The AwayGame Brand
Brand building is an art. Like a painting or a film, a visual brand can make people feel real emotions. It can conjure up mental associations or put people in specific moods. The strongest visual brands can be identified immediately by people of all ages. As we continue to build the AwayGame app and establish the business, I’ve spent a lot of time on the visual brand. It’s simple, recognizable, and will hopefully become the calling card for everyone’s favorite travel app.
The AwayGame brand started with a call to my friend and former colleague Natalie Hesse. Natalie worked with me as a Social Media Specialist but through freelance work, school, and past positions she also had a ton of experience with graphic design and branding. The first thing to tackle was the brand’s primary color, and it was a pretty easy decision to go with some shade of green. Green is reminiscent of a sports field or pitch, and basic color theory states that green is positive and natural. High level research also showed that green was the least used color in team branding, allowing us to avoid associating AwayGame with a specific team that could cause negative associations from that team’s rivals.
The next step was trickier and even more important: the logo. We talked about wanting to indicate sports in subtle ways while giving people the feeling of travel and allowing the brand to feel like an event. This gave us so many different paths to go down. Some of the first sketches were done in December of last year. The visual of a truck was super interesting as it implied travel and tailgating so we explored a lot of options down that road. In the end we didn’t find a way to do it right, so we began to check out the possibilities of using a shield. Shields are extremely popular abroad as the logos of soccer clubs, so we believed that stateside it would be a strong enough tie to sports but not so recognizable that it would prevent us from owning the visual as we scaled.
As we refined the shield it got simpler and more modern, leaving us with the light green and three ticketed version that was in place for the announcement of the company. You could say this was AwayGame’s first official branding:
As I designed the app itself and began to get feedback into what a user would see and feel when interacting with it, I realized that we still weren’t quite finished. The green, while very reminiscent of grass, was too washed out and didn’t pop like we wanted it to. The logo was almost complete, but didn’t have the flat modernity of a proper tech company. Some minor reworks brought it to where it is now, and I’m super excited about the current visuals of the company and can’t wait to build a brand around them!
We’re also careful to use a standard font across all branding assets, the website, and app for further consistency. Looking forward I’m hoping to incorporate a tertiary color into the branding for more complex use cases (most likely to be a blue that is analogous to the green).
Keep up with AwayGame on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for more news as the app gets closer to launch and don’t forget to visit us at awaygame.co.
