Why I Chose Green over Pink
Designing The PawSeekr App
Designing an app is a whole new territory for me. I‘m more of a webpage kind of girl. I guess there’s a first time for everything.
Regardless of the platform, the process is very similar. This case study is going to cover my process of creating the style guide and logo for PawSeekr. Keep in mind this is my second project at RED Academy and not an actual client or app.
Want to see me design the actual app interface? You can find that case study here.
Brief
Each dog has a personality and heart of its own. The current options for finding and adopting a dog are often tedious, limited and impersonal. PawSeekr enables users to locate their ideal dog, educate themselves on ownerships must-knows, pet personalities, and all of the steps a user needs to take to own a dog that perfectly matches them.
Target Device: iOS
Research!
Before I even put pen on paper, I began looking at what currently operating organizations had for their logos.
It looked like pet supply companies and animal service organizations use blues in their logos (probably to make them seem more welcoming). I was not going to use blue in my logo because PawSeekr was neither a store nor a municipal animal service organization.
The Toronto Animal Humane society uses greens and browns — a very natural and down to earth combo. The Etobicoke Human Society uses a bright orange which makes them feel as if they are a rescue group, orange bringing out the urgency in what they do.
Orange is a bit too urgent for what is supposed to be a friendly experience. I do like the green and brown, however I don’t think the brown is going to give me that clean and fresh vibe.
PetFinder is extremely similar to PawSeekr. They use purple and that really sets them aside from other pet-related organizations. No matter how far I scrolled down Google’s image search page, no other logos used purple. This is when I decided to use a pink-purple gradient, leaning more on the pink side. PawSeekr was going to be attractive and stand out from all other pet apps.
Putting My Paws to Work!
I took a step back and made a mood board. This revealed some important information to me. I used Adobe Color to grab random colours from the board and create a palette for me. Maybe this would show me other options for a logo colour.
I ran the board through some people and they all used similar adjectives: homely, companion, joy. This is what I was going for. Keeping the mood and palette in mind, I started sketching out potential logos.
I decided to go with a clean font instead of anything too decorative. Because this was an app, I took into consideration a simpler version of the whole logo that could be used as the icon on your phone’s home screen.
I really liked this design, to be honest. The paw was important because the app is literally called PawSeekr. And the universal map pin icon signals to users that the app would somehow relate to the geographical location of the paw/dog. No matter what language you speak, this logo still says the same thing. There was just one thing bothering me…
This logo looked way too similar to Instagram’s logo.
I knew I had to change the colour palette altogether. Yes, this pink logo stood out amongst other pet related logos, but it now blended in too much with another social media logo. If this icon was on your home screen, you might think it has some relation to Instagram.
Looking back at my mood board, the colour green comes up a lot. It’s natural and refreshing. It would also stand out, yet still blend in with the sharp gradients and simplicity of some big apps.
The green worked much better than the pink. It looks a lot more natural and homely now. Now that green was gonig to be my primary colour in my palette, I had to come up with a few more. Purple was an obvious choice for accents and pops. It is a complementary colour to green and adds a bit of luxury to the interface. I put together a style tile.
Style Tiles have more information that a Mood Board and less information than a Style Guide. It gives you the gist of what I, as a designer, am going for without overwhelming you with HEX codes and specifics.
It includes the logo, chosen fonts, examples of buttons, links, paragraphs, palettes, and adjectives that describe the app’s vibe. If the client were real, I would hand this off to them and get feedback.
Now for the more complex and specific style guide.
The style guide includes very specific information for designers and developers to reference as they work on the app. This includes minimum logo sizes and spacing, font kerning and letting, font sizes, font colours, uses of colours, etc.
As long as this guide exists, the style of the app will be consistent as it gets passed along from designer to designer over time.
Now it was time to work on designing the interface. You can find that case study here.
Reflection
I am usually pretty hesitant to design logos because there is just so much that goes into them. I am really happy with the outcome of the PawSeekr logo. The colours and style and font work so well together. I’m glad I didn’t stick with the original pink. I have a bad habit of getting stuck on a specific design decision, but this project really showed me how I’ve become more open to changes.
