BrandJoe

I’ve just finalised the design of my logo and I honestly think it’s been one of the easiest logo’s I have ever designed which is unusual because I normally struggle when producing my own work. I though I’d write this post to give you a little background on my design process and thoughts behind it.

Out with the old.

Why out with the old? For a few reasons really, I felt people weren’t really “getting” the message behind my old logo, peoples comments were “too goth” when actually it was representing a tattoo. A tattoo being very strong self expression and when a brand has managed to get people to voluntarily tattoo their brand onto a persons body, I feel that any brand must of really succeeded as the person has very strong emotional ties to the brand. I play basketball on a regular basis for the Windsor Warriors and the amount of players that have a Nike tick or (Micheal) Jordan logo tattooed on their bodies is quite outstanding. Anyway people were not getting the connotations behind my tattoo so time to move on, the second reason was that my website needed a refresh (which I’m currently undergoing) and the natural place to start for me was a new logo, to get a feel for where my new site was going.

Initial thought process

This was very much as self branding, self promotion process and I really wanted to focus my design on my interests in my life. So what are the interests in my life?

Geekery, which covers social media, computing and gadgets

Business, I really enjoy applying my skill sets to solve business needs particularly in the marketing environment

Basketball, as I’ve already mentioned

Design, has been passion of mine from a very early age

Music, have always had a keen interest in music, especially funky hiphop, motown, blues funk and soul (MOBO) although I do not souly listen to this type of music and in my younger years enjoyed DJ’ing with friends such a DJ Tigerstyle 3xWorld Champ.

Influences

My influence came from supreme beings clothing label spin off geek (p.s. if you know anywhere I can buy this stuff anymore send me link) along with @imjustcreative latest logo set…I loved the way he had created lots of different logos for the same brand to represent different connotations of his services.

So I set to the design and had a pretty clear idea where I was  going with it. Below was my first initial drawing, admittedly I’m not the best artist in the world but it really good to get my ideas down on paper quickly which cements the idea for me and provide clear direction.

Initial Design

So after creating my initial design I decided to pas it round to a few peers and clients to get their feedback, the response was pretty succinct loving the new look, as the old logo is a little “goth”, but really not sure abut the rainbow. The rainbow was there to portray radio signals (like a RSS icon) and the fact that I broadcast information on a regular basis, this was not getting across as the comments I was getting back were things like “the rainbow looks a bit playmobil” at this stage I had not chosen my final type face for the logo either.

Here are some of the other comments:

I like it – shows you work with all types of businesses, looks trendy but serious, & it’s a bit different…

I prefer your new idea logo, thought the present one looked a bit goth : )  Not sure about about the rainbow behind the people, otherwise looks great.

I think it’s so important to get feedback on your work as much as possible and with discussions over the phone, IM and twitter I received some great feedback from people, and also by contacting my clients I have also managed to pick up some additional work… communicate communicate communicate.

Finalising

So after all this feedback and a few more tweaks, removing the rainbow and choosing a better typeface I was complete and very happy with the final design! I was also really taken back by the amount of positive feedback I received from twitter facebook and email.

Here’s some of it

One comment was made that “it may help if you have strap line with the logo” so will be implementing that in due course, along with my BrandNew web site so……watch this space!!

If you have any comments or feedback on this article I’d love to hear what you have to say please comment below this post aslo don’t forget to share the post in your social networks using the share option below.