George Bond

So this brief is to create a logo for George Bond Interior Design. In the written brief it was stated that the logo should be simple, elegant, sophisticated, clear, contemporary and some colors that would be appreciated are Red, Grey, Black. Here are my logo designs.

Plan of the week

So the plan last week was to finish my NHS logo so I could move onto other briefs and I am happy to report that I have indeed finished the logo. Actually I did more than one logo but still its done and I can move on.

Here are some of my logos I did the bottom one first, its a bit obvious and you can clearly tell what my inspiration was the top logo is a bit more subtle and based on the shutter mechanism of a camera, I like the colors the blue and yellow especially, the green could be tweaked a little but when I always look back on work I've done I always see what I could change to make it better which is not a bad thing I suppose, just a fact of life you can always see your mistakes when looking back.

So this weeks plan, well there really isn't one because its the Easter holidays and I'm starting my placement so the next post I do will be all about my time at a real design company. Wish me luck.

Brand yourself...

So last week the tutors gave the whole class a task to research some examples of personal branding and then to try it for yourself and come up with a logo. During the research I found that the people who use personal branding most are usually fashion designers. The reasons for this is that nowadays fashion designers use branding a lot to help market and sell their designs, so having a brand identity similar to what large clothing company's have makes sense. Also I've seen a trend that some very big name fashion designers take Vera Wang for example use their brand to help them move into other retail areas such as home furnishings, footwear and luggage (weirdly enough).

I've found that personal branding it is very important when it comes to succeed in any field. The only problem with the task of branding myself is that I don't have a clear graphic identity yet, I'm in my first year on this course so compared to other graphic designers who have had years to perfect their craft I'm just a novice barely starting out. It might take years for me to finally be able to fully understand my own graphic style and maybe then I can truly look into my own personal branding, but until then I still had a go at the task just to see what my mind could come up with.

And I have no doubt that 5 years from now when I'm doing my real personal branding I'll look back and cringe at what I came up with...so here it goes it started with rough sketches.

Maybe just initials?
Am I a little retro?
Perhaps more casual with an asterisk?
Or slightly resembling the M&S logo?
Maybe I'm bold and eye catching, how about cursive?

So I did the task and branded myself and I can honesty say bring on the next 5 years because I don't have a clue. Maybe just initials?

Logo's - Evaluation

Project Reflection (Using SWOT)

What did you enjoy about the project?

For the Sync brief I enjoyed trying to come with fun ways to visually show the company.

What you didn't enjoy about the project?

I carnet say that I didn't enjoy the project it just wasn't greatly challenging. 

Have you encountered any problems?

It was difficult to try and come with ideas for the briefs, I had trouble bring to create visuals for the companies as they very unique and I didn't want to create a standard boring unoriginal logo.

What went well?

I really liked create a whole new font for the Subeaze brief I think it went well. 

What didn't go well?

I could of spent some more time on the Subeaze font to really refine every letter.

New skills acquired?

I learned a lot during these logo briefs. For the Subeaze brief I learned a lot about how to manipulate paths with the anchor tools. On the Sync brief I also gained a lot of skills in Illustrator including gradients, colors and embossing.

Did my time management go well, did I hit the internal deadlines?

I think this project was very well managed when it comes to time and I hit the deadline and and everything ready to hand in before the deadline.

Logo Competition - Sync

Newcastle University set up a competition to create a logo, as they have recently started Sync a consultancy that aims to bring together scientific research and the public's needs. They knew they didn't want really bright colours especially red or orange because of there emotional connotations, but instead suggested to aim towards more friendly and relaxing colours such as greens, blues and yellows.

Early Ideas

I came across the idea of having all the letters connecting as I wanted to give the logo a 'sync' like quality.

Final Ideas

These are some final designs that I entered for the competition. When it came to the design process there were quite a few variations on my original idea that I liked, so I ended with four final logo's.

This project helped me quite a lot in terms of learning the key features of Photoshop and Illustrator as I was just learning how to use them at the time and helped me build on my limited knowledge of the software. 

Looking back I probably should have tried more ideas in the beginnings of the project instead of committing to just one straight away, developing more than just one idea is maybe something I can think about when it comes to new projects. 

Logo Competition - Subeaze

Hi I wanted to show you how I designed a logo to enter a competition, the logo is for a company that is completely online, it is a service for subcontractors within the construction industry. For obvious reasons we were told by the company that they would prefer any colours that linked with the construction industry or signage such as black, yellow, blue etc.

For this logo I wanted to try and create my very own font. So I started drawing some very basic different shapes for the letter 's'. I knew I wanted to create a very masculine font with quite thick lines but also maybe do something with diagonal angles.

Early ideas

After going through some ideas I mapped out the entire name of the logo making sure that I measured all the letters to be the same height and that they all had the same amount of spacing between them.

Rough hand drawn idea

I then scanned this drawing into my computer and started to re-create it on illustrator using simple anchor points to build a rough idea of my logo.

Final Logo Designs

These are the final logo designs I created for the competition. I had fun designing a whole new font myself instead of using an already excising one from the Internet, and I definitely want to try it again. Its exactly how I wanted it to be masculine, bold but with a difference.