For a number of years I have to admit I’ve never really gotten all the attention that is given to this thing called ‘a brand’. I’ve probably been poisoned a bit by my interaction with designers who use the ‘its not on brand’ excuse as to the reason why I need to move the logo by two pixels – seriously is the consumer really going to care?
So now I find myself in unfamiliar territory, setting up my own business and therefore needing to create ‘a brand’. Given my previous almost disdain for brands why do I now feel I need ‘a brand’ for my business. Well it certainly isn’t for recognition, I don’t expect people to see my logo and instantly think AB Development, but I do need to look professional if I want people to hire my services. So given this rather simple requirement, all I really need to create my brand is a logo I can use for company stationery and on my site.
Creating the logo
Any regular readers and anyone else who knows me knows that I’m no designer which is why I’ve found creating a logo particularly challenging. I have some fairly easy going requirements, it needs to be:
- Simple;
- Suitable for a favicon (or easily adaptable);
- Convey ‘development’ as a visual message.
It has been the final requirement which has caused me the most trouble. Ultimately I didn’t need to satisfy all of the requirements, two out of three would have been sufficient.
The other issue I have is that even if I came up with a great concept I still need to realise it in graphic form. Now even though I don’t know too much about graphic design, one thing I do know is that ideally a logo should be created in a vector format, and this means using Adobe Illustrator. I would have struggled to use photoshop, but my experience of illustrator is zero. Armed with Google I figured I could probably struggle through, and indeed I have, here are some of my ideas and the final design. Ultimately I may not use the logo long-term, if the business takes off and in the unlikely situation of requiring brand recognition I will pay someone with artistic talent to do a much better job than I ever could!
Concepts
The simplest concept I could come up with was to utilise my existing logo for albinns.com and simply add the word Development to it.
Whilst I was relatively happy with the logo originally it really had a different motivation, that was based around the whim of using <canvas> to create it. I wasn’t sure the logo was suitable for my business needs.
My next idea revolved around an old school cube. A and B easily map onto the front facing sides of a cube, which is relatively simple to put together in illustrator. Cubes are good as they are fairly easy to colourise which can easily be extended to a site. Whilst easy to make I wasn’t overly happy with the result.
My third idea was to go a bit more abstract in the font treatment and to simplify the shape. A circle easily fits the first two requirements and again offers good colourisation option and can also be given the Web 2.0 treatment. Was this a bit too abstract though, and did I have the skill to make it more than a circle?
So far none of the logos really hit home with my final requirement of being able to convey a development visual message. I decided to revisit the cube idea and work on it a bit. I had the idea of conveying a box of ideas, perhaps a toolbox. I was a bit worried about my ability to draw a toolbox, so instead opted for a cardboard box concept, something I could potentially develop further by putting objects inside, other logos, or tools.
I worked this concept up in illustrator and was fairly pleased with the result given my lack of skill and experience, but the more I looked at it the more I thought it missed the mark on my requirements.
At this point I was struggling and a bit underwhelmed by what I was producing. I decided to go back to abstract but change the approach, a motif which could serve as the favicon and a simple font for the company name.
Playing around with masks in illustrator I came up with a burst style motif. Again my design skills let me down and it still didn’t really work for me, nothing about this motif satisfied the third requirement.
The motif idea had legs it seemed so I pushed this further. After a little inspirational research one icon which seemed to work for development was a set of cogs, owing I guess from the engineering history. This was something I could work up in illustrator fairly easily.
At last I had something which I was fairly happy with. It satisfied my three requirements and had a professional feel to it. Is it actually any good though, well I guess that’s subjective and I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer that question, any comments are of course always welcome!
What’s next?
Well now I have a workable logo its time to build a site around it. Until then I now have a holding page up at http://www.abdevelopment.co.uk which sports the new logo.
Nice to see the progression.
It *might* be nicer with a lower case ‘d’ in development (would possibly feel more balanced), but as you say such things are mucho subjective. :-)
On designer recommendation am playing with the typography now, might be able to balance it a bit more! Thanks for the feedback!
Well done for persevering with this stressful process. I don’t do a lot of design work but I do have a design background of sorts. I do think you’ve developed the idea to a good point, but there’s been one crucial thing letting some of these designs down:
They all give away a bit too much about the tools that were used to produce them. You set out to create a vector logo, and that’s what you’ve got. All of them look like something made in illustrator (gradients, perfect hard lines). Except, interestingly the last. Because you dropped back to a silhouette, and ditched the gradients, you have something that doesn’t give as much away about how it was made. It could have been cut out of paper for all we know, which is great. The gears also have a detail and no obvious straight lines which makes them look more human than the other designs.
But for the final push I recommend you look at your typeface. Again, it’s giving a bit too much away because it’s such a standard typeface that it could have been assembled in MS Word. I think a sans-serif face is right, but maybe search for something with a tiny bit more personality. An example is Aller from daltonmaag.com which has a free licence. Or if you feel flush have a browse round myfonts.com. But stick to something conservative and not too fancy, otherwise it will clash with the cleanliness of the gears. It needs to be of a similar visual language to your mark.
Also, I would just nudge down the AB as the space beneath it is a little too high and looks like it’s floated up away from the line below. Make the vertical space between the two lines of text roughly match the horizontal space between the mark and the type, so you have a harmony in your negative space…. lovely!
Hope that helps a bit!
Hi Jamie, thanks for the great critique, excellent advice, and very similar to the first reaction from some graphic designer friends of mine. I am looking at the typeface now and experimenting a bit. Having looked back at the design I agree completely with the font spacing, it is very unbalanced. These however are tweaks which very much I should be able to make.
Check out fontsquirrel.com for some nice free fonts to play with.
I think the last option is defo the best too and with Jamie’s comments it’ll be ace.
I’m glad you’ve not gone with abstract the flaccid cock and balls in option #3 ;-)
Ha ha that was actually my number 2 favourite. But now you’ve pointed out the cock and balls I think that one’s best laid to rest!
Hi Al.
For what it’s worth–which isn’t very much–my advice would be to stick with your existing, initials-based logo and not bother adding the “development” bit. What you’re talking about seems to be your logo as opposed to your brand, which will surely become established as you work for clients and showcase it on your web site. And some of your work will inevitably be design, and consultancy, as well as development – hence my suggestion to leave out the word “development”, which people don’t care about anyway.
On a broader note, surely the somewhat nebulous concept of “brand” and its creation is in any case not within the jurisdiction of any single discipline, whether that be design, user-experience (sigh), creative (whatever that means), the techies, the customer service team, the marketing and sales departments yada yada, but the net result of what a business actually does–neither how splendid its logo looks nor how nice its hairdo is–and, ultimately, how compelling its offering is to consumers in the shark-infested waters of capitalism.
You have plenty of talents that will be valuable to businesses. Don’t waste time fretting over your logo. I don’t suppose the founders of Google, Facebook, etc. ever did.
Cheers –
D.