Design problems part 1: I am the worst client
By Adam France
Head of Creative @ Lo + Behold
This is the first post of many which talks about design problems and how I overcame them.
When I was first informed about the transformation from Evolutia to Lo + Behold I was really excited. I was given free rein to brand the company — a clean slate, a fresh start, however I wanted it to be.
It was the perfect design job. Or was it? It’s never quite that simple is it?
Our MD, Dave wanted to take a step back from the design process and only wanted to step in at certain points along the way. It was his baby, surely he had big ideas and plans for the branding of the company? I didn’t understand this at first, but it makes sense now.
Design is very rarely easy, it’s more than always a challenge, and it’s made even harder when designing for yourself or the company you work for. You’ll never find a tougher client to deal with. Well, maybe other than that one problem client we’ve all had. Yeah, that one.
As a designer, I come with the usual traits of being a bit of perfectionist and also being my own worst critic, these are great characteristics to have as you always strive to create the very best work you can by being like this, but when creating work for yourself, it then becomes a bit of a vicious circle.
On to the positive stuff and design process…
Branding isn’t just creating a logo, choosing some nice colours and sticking them on a website. Sure, a logo does go a long way in representing a company, it’s the first thing people will see. You need to consider more important things such as company values, company goals, USPs, target audience, all wrapped up around a suitable tone of voice and how these things are perceived by others.
In this case, the logo did come first…
I had full control of how I envisioned the company to look, both online and offline, there was no real set brief given by Dave, other than him being a big fan of patterns and that gradients were a big no-no. With that in mind, I did have a few initial ideas that I wanted to expand on but thought the best way of generating more ideas was to create inspiration boards using Pinterest. I’ve used it in the past for general browsing, but never really used it as a tool to aid the design process.
I tasked Ben, the newest member of our design team and myself with creating individual Pinterest boards filled with found imagery from branding, to nice design in general. Basically anything that caught our eye or we liked the look of that could potentially influence us or trigger an idea to get started.
Once we’d both taken the time to collate our boards, we went about looking over them side by side and comparing them. Surprisingly, (or not) it became clear from looking that we were both very much on the same wavelength in terms of design styles and trends, so filtering down our boards to a more a refined selection of images was easy.
From there, Ben decided to explore the pattern idea in more depth using the ‘L’ ‘+’ and ‘B’ characters from the new company name, with the possibility of making them tile and tessellate. He also worked on another idea using the new company name in various typographical situations based upon existing found typographic treatments. See below for a few examples of this.
Dave stepped in at this point to suggest that although he really liked what Ben had put together, using these treatments might dilute the launch of the company as these were a bit more of fun design project, rather than a design rebrand. I fully agreed, and we decided to put this idea on hold for the time being.
From there, Ben worked further on the tiling patterns idea and produced some great looking work, here’s a small animation of them in situ.
I looked at exploring the idea of creating a logo that could be interactive— something that could be moved around, and played with, possibility even animate the logo in many ways. A logo that represented the way we think creatively in terms of both design and development of the work we produced. I wanted something that was fun.
Here’s a screenshot showing the development of the logo design process.
Until next time…
