Our Branding

Learning by Doing

Hi, I’m Idunn!

I’m not a graphic design student.

I do, however, have a passion for it.

I also happened to be the only person to volunteer when we needed someone to make a logo for Relic.

As the head of social media for for this project, I take our branding very seriously.

Perhaps too seriously.

But as a student web-series, social media is the only marketing we can afford, and without it, nobody will see our work. The branding and marketing of a TV show or film is something that’s easy to overlook, yet vital to the project’s suuccess.

So, for some potentially interesting content, I though I’d walk you through the process of creating our branding for Relic.

Initially, I used Powerpoint (yes, really) for some rough ideas. It actually works quite well for very simple type-based logos, but we needed more than this:

So, I bit the bullet and paid Adobe a hefty sum of money for a Creative Cloud subscription. While I had some experience in Photoshop and Premiere Pro, I was completely new to Illustrator.

This was definitely a learning-by-doing type process, but eventually I ended up with a large amount of potential logos, fonts, and colour schemes:

For me, selecting a logo was a case of balance.

Vintage or modern? Generic or plain?

We needed it to express the fantasy-elements of the series, but not seem outdated or old. It had to be unique and instantly recognisable, but also simple and accessible.

In addition, I received some feedback form the rest of the team, like wanting to keep the flame from some of the earlier Powerpoint designs. Eventually, we landed on our current logo:

For the colour scheme, I just made a bunch of different options, and made Henry choose one. Thanks Henry!

As for the social media content, I was very insistent on it being serious and professional. We want to seem proper and employable after all.

However, as you can probably sense if you’ve been following us, that qucikly changed!

We’re students! This is a passion project! We want to have fun, and we want our content to be fun.

It’s so important that we find a balance between appearing professional, yet friendly and approachable. This is something we’re trying to keep consistent from our social media, to our promo videos, and blog posts. Hopefully we’re succeeding!

Speaking of which, we’d love to hear from you! If you have feedback, questions, or just want to chat about filmmaking (we’re friendly, I promise!), please reach out on social media or at relicwebseries@gmail.com.

Idunn Marthinsen, Co-showrunner