Wiieat- Logo & Branding case study
This is my first ever case study, woohoo excited!(little bit nervous too) To be honest there are tons of tabs opened on my browser which are, “how to write your first case study”, “how to write the intro of your first blog”, “how this…how that…!
But deep inside if you just close your eyes and recall, you know the process you followed. You know the approach that worked out for you. When you’re writing your case study, all you are doing is expressing the question, the premise that challenged you to think and employ your skills, and the motivation behind all the discoveries you made.
Overview
As part of my Internship, I was assigned to create the logo and branding for Wiieat. I used The Design thinking process throughout the journey. I tried mentioning each and every step of the process, how I approached it and why it is important. So I hope by the end of the journey you will understand my process along with the basics of design thinking. let’s not make anymore delay!
Get Ready for the roller coaster journey! See you there :)
Introduction
Wiieat: As the name suggests, it is a Indian food delivery company in The Leicester City of UK. Wiieat provides lunch and dinner, subscription-based meals from nearby restaurants at an affordable price. A typical user can opt for a subscription plan and get food delivered on time with 0% hassle. They are delivering and providing takeaways in Leicester city and Leicestershire, UK.
My Role: Creative Lead & Visual Designer
Objective: Logo, branding and print media design
Time taken: 1 Week
The Process
Generally in my day to day life, on pretty much every problem I apply the design thinking process. Here with no more surprise, I started with the same technique.
The process goes like this:
Empathize
In general empathizing technique is used to understand the end user goals and motivations.
Our primary stakeholders are students, Indians or South Asians living in Leicester city, small scale restaurant owners etc…
Initially, It was a little hard for me to understand the UK market and their likings. So I conducted few user interviews to get a clear idea and clarification. Wait! Isn’t it surprisingly weird that that I conducted user interview for logo process? I know it is, but yes I also have to work on UX for the same. Stay tuned for that UX Case study. Now, let’s concentrate on the branding process. User interviews helped me a lot while ideation process.
Few of the challenges here are I want to make it look minimal, it should match the interests of UK market, and importantly, I have to impress my boss xD
Define
So with that findings, we successfully reached to second step, ie Define. The beauty of design thinking process is, it is a iterative(Non-linear) process. What I actually mean is while you are defining a problem or in what ever the step you feel stuck, you can go back and iterate it, you can redefine or refine the process.
The key challenges are already defined and came up with few questions, after thoroughly doing research I started ideation.
The questions are as follows:
- What logo type should I choose?
- What colors best suits our brand?
- What best represents the company?
- Which font best suits our brand?
- Who are the target audience?
- Does it feature a memorable gimmik?
and so on…
I first tried defining these questions. As per the brand guidelines brief, I decided to choose a minimal type logo that can be used for pretty much everything. So with this basic understandings, just before hopping on the web, I tried to sketch down a few of my ideas, What generally happens is every time I take inspiration from the web, I tend to get attracted or Influenced by the other designs. So to make sure not to miss those original ideas I quickly sketch them. Then I take lots and lots of inspiration.
Coming to color, Believe it or not, certain colors can stimulate — or turn off — appetites. If you want your patrons to order starters or dessert, you might want to think about color schemes and how they affect the human brain. It wasn’t very hard for me to pick a nice color, As I have a strong knowledge of color theory, I quickly picked up the “Color of Hunger” which is a color range from red to yellow. I picked a vibrant and attractive orange.
Mood Board
While researching, I started taking inspiration for a wide range of topics from colors to type and elements to textures. I Don’t limit myself to a single search or a single site. Sky is my limit!
For me, creating a mood is not less interesting than shopping. You get to try different styles, colors, etc. This is where you start sensing ideas are popping out from your brain, don’t let them go. My mood board turned out to be like this
Color and Typography
So finalizing the colors and Fonts are done. Keeping Black and white colors in your pallet will be very helpful throughout the process. I generally use the tints and shades of the primary color for clear hierarchy, the same goes with the font. I mostly stick to 1 or 2 typefaces, I feel more comfortable choosing only one typeface and I use different weights of the same font for clear hierarchy, I decided to use a Sans-serif font, Because they convey simplicity and modernity or minimalism.
Mind Mapping
Moving on, Right after surfing around the web, I took a blank canvas and dumped few keywords which are popping into my brain. That helped me to gather all the information which is in my mind and keywords to pick up few elements which might use in the iteration of the logo process.
Brainstorming (Ideation)
Here starts the fun part, Finally we reached the 3rd step where I started brainstorming ideas and sketching them. Pencil sketches are very useful in this phase because we concentrate on creativity rather than the ease of doing it in any software so that we can ensure that ideas are not biased or influenced by external factors. This is a significant stage that can satisfy several needs. During this phase, I try to sketch whatever pops out of the brain without judging the quality of the idea. The only thing I do is think, sketch, think, sketch and go on. After sketching few ideas I rank them and refine them further. Here you can see the set of early sketches for the logo.
This is very effective because it becomes really helpful for communication with stakeholders to discuss if the general directions of the creative search correspond to their expectations or not. This way is especially effective if the requirements are quite blurred or if you have multiple ideas that are worth trying out.
After ranking them, I sketch them again but this time little clear and creative. Then I move on to further development of few ideas and pick the best after trying it out in several ways.
This the finalized sketch, here I would like to talk a little bit about this idea. Generally, few memorable elements when it comes to cooking are cutlery, crockery and other cooking items. To make the logo memorable, I decided to use a spatula and to make it even more memorable and recognizable I tried negative spacing. I always wanted to try it and see it in real life, I used this opportunity very well to impose this technique. From here I moved to illustrator and started developing the sketch.
Development
During this process I developed the sketches to digital using Adobe illustrator, I developed 3–4 variants but eventually, they got rejected, with further development and refinement i was able to reach perfection. Trust me, if you get frustrated with the feedback you gonna screw up the design. I try to listen to every feedback clearly and implement them. Here are the few logos that are initially got rejected.
Thankfully there are no major changes, but I was asked to fix few little things. This made me so energetic and encouraging to move forward. What if I got negative feedback and major changes? Still, it is fine, All I will do is take a deep breath and move forward with positivity.
After making few required changes, the idea turned out to be a super hit. I keep iterating till I get satisfied fully and until I get something that I feel can imagine bringing to the real world. My greatest motivation is seeing my idea in reality. Here is how it turned out to be.
Test Phase
In this phase, we generally check whether the outcome works on every medium or not. By creating quick mockups I checked all the use cases ranging from digital use like webpages and mobile screens to print materials and merchandise. This is one of the favourite phases for stakeholders because they get to see their brand in the real world. We will show the visuals of the uses, this is the best time to impress them ;)
Packaging Time…
As the logo finalized and everyone is extremely happy with the outcome. Now comes the final and crucial part. Why I’m saying this as crucial part is that ever created is not the final, Implementation is very much important. Though every phase is important throughout the process, I consider whichever phase I am in as the most important phase.
Trust The Process
For packaging, I decided to keep it the same style, which is a minimal and clean design. To start I again started research and brainstorming idea. I’m not going to show that while process. I decided to showcase few important steps in the packaging process.
Prototype
One of the visions of the company is to stay eco-friendly and sustainable. While sketching the initial layouts I decided to make something that can be packed with very less material. And also while after finalizing the layout I made a simple working prototype to check how usable it is and how easy it is to handle. Then I quickly developed the layout in illustrator.
Again the fun part, I created few mockups to check how it might look in the real world.
Test
Tada!!! This turned out to be very clean. All the stakeholders approved my design and I took a great step after this. For the perfect print check, I took 2–3 printouts from the nearby printing press. This step helps to understand how the design looks after print, and if there are any minute copy or color changes you can modify them. This takes less than 100 rupees but skipping this step may lead to a huge loss if it is sent to mass printing without a quality check.
Due to light reflections, the colors are a little bit odd here but the actual printouts turned out to be really good. And that is it… Thank you so much for making it towards the end! And please feel free to reach me out or comment if you have any questions or queries.
This is my very first blog, first case study and this is the first time I’m writing. Thank you for reading it and please bang the 50 claps 👏🏻 This will tell me to write more of it! Also, leave your valuable feedback to improve.
Reach me out at my mail: goutham.madeti@gmail.com
Feel free to connect with me on Linkedin: Gowtham Madeti | LinkedIn
