The Process And Thoughts Behind My New Brand
In my last post I wrote about how I had finally come to a conclusion and figured out how I was going to represent myself as an online and offline brand, but I didn’t really explain how I got there. This post aims to cover the gaps and fill in the holes and show where I gathered all of my inspiration to get to grips with my branding project.
First stop? No, not Dribbble or Behance, but Google Images, ApartmentTherapy and DesignMilk. Being a trained physical product designer I find that a lot of my inspiration comes from physical as opposed to digital based design work. I love exploring the silhouettes used by industrial designers in items of furniture, lighting or smaller hand-held gadgets/products. For me exploring physical design is always important when I design anything for the digital space; the size of an iPhone for instance is important when looking over an app design and contemplating icon size or spacing between text/buttons. Having a background in Product Design (what is now possibly more commonly known as Industrial Design) has led me to have an overarching influence in my design style from physical design houses and designers. Loving the aesthetics of Dieter Rams, Charles and Ray Eames, Jacob Jensen, Marc Newson, Arne Jacobsen, Philipe Starck and many more (I could go on but I don’t think this is the time nor the place) industrial design will always hold a place for me and my inspiration. Therefore searching through websites such as ApartmentTherapy, DesignMilk, ICON and many others seems natural to me.
As you may be able to tell from the images above, I love mid-century design. The clean lines, mildly washed out colours and general simplicity and functionality added to the design, I truly believe this was one of the greatest design eras the modern world has seen. Pulling influence from this era I decided that my logo/branding would be crafted from a selection of geometric shapes, sans-serif type and simplicity. So that means no overly zealous type choices, no garish colours but something that would allow my logo/branding to be able to almost blend into any piece of work I produced. Adaptable is probably a better way of putting it.
The next step was indeed to visit those websites like Dribbble and Behance, to find how other people have either represented themselves as designers, companies and even how some have adapted their digital design to replicate mid-century interior architecture and furniture design. I also wanted to check to see if anyone had attempted at crafting a monogram to represent themselves. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have also previously used two variations on a monogram in order to represent myself. My thinking here was that a monogram can be a unique enough identifier yet remain simple enough to be adaptable for use on different forms of work.
Whilst working on my logo I also remembered a wonderful experiment by Joe Harrison about responsive logos. In this experiment he has basically taken a variety of famous companies logos, from Coca-Cola through to Heineken and even Disney and made them adapt to their browser viewport size whilst still keeping them visually associated with their company. When I first saw this over a year ago I loved it but had never really had the chance of experimenting with it myself — now was my chance.
So, I had now decided that I want to design myself a simple logo usable at all screen sizes, from desktop to mobile and everything in-between. Working on this concept I decided to first try and start designing something with just my initials in mind. Rather than use my full set, SNG (Sean Nicholas Geraghty), I decided instead to just stick with SG. This choice allowed me to look back at what I had previously with my monogram design and allow this project to be more of an evolutionary step than a complete rebrand.
Working on the basis that I was now focussing on my initials I started to think about how best to accommodate this in a “responsive logo” format. Thinking about the above Coca-Cola example, it starts out by including as much information as is necessary for a larger screen, from the company name to the product name and even the abbreviation. For me this was a little too much information, I only have my name that I am working with here. So why not start with that? I first decided to experiment with a variety of font choices, from simple examples like Slabo and Oswald, through to a variety of script fonts; Scriptina, Dancing Script and Starshine; before I finally settled on Montserrat. The Montserrat family has 8 different weights, from hairline, through to black and is very reminiscent of Gotham with subtle differences throughout.
Working with Montserrat now as my selected font, I started to experiment with differing font weights. As I go by my first name, I decided that this would take more of a central role, therefore I decided to increase the weight of that part and decrease the font-weight attached to my surname.
Playing around with placing was my next step. After some experiments with stacking (first name on-top of surname, etc.) I decided to instead stick with a single line. This not only gave me more room to play around with the external dimensions, but I could also then place this inside any form of symbol/shape I wanted to without altering the placement.
So next was to try and tidy it all up. To do that I decided the best way would be to frame my name inside a shape. I wanted to stick with simple geometry as I believe that this best represents my style as a designer. As I mentioned previously, this branding piece has to represent myself entirely as a designer and therefore I needed to ensure that this logo stuck to my core values (or as most people know them as Dieter Rams Ten Principles For Good Design).
The final point of Dieter Rams Ten Principles For Good Design is this:
Good Design Is As Little Design As Possible
So therefore, having my name inside a square, with a non-flourishing font is pretty much as simple as I could get. I could now get to work on creating the “squashed” versions, so the versions of the logo I envisage being seen on mobile, and social networks etc. To do this, I grabbed the S and the G from my logo and started by bringing them closer together until they merged into one shape. I then decided to add a cap to the G as it felt like it could be easily mistaken for a C at this size. I finally increased the gap between the top of the S and the G to give them both a bit more definition before finishing up by tidying up the curves.
The monogram is also presented in a square here to match the full length logo. I envisage this being the logo used on the mobile variant of the website. However as I had now added in a cap to the G it no longer matched the full length logo. Therefore I had to update that too.
So there we have it; those were my processes behind the creation of my logo. If you liked this article please recommend it and if you want to read more then do follow me on Twitter or on here. Thanks for reading.
