New-Look ‘Fox’ Logo

As many of you reading this are probably aware, creating logos for other companies usually takes a fair bit of work, but is accomplished easilly enough.

When it comes to designing a vision for your own company, or for yourself, the challenge multiplies ten-fold. This is your branding, it has to reflect as much about you as possible, and usually, far more time is spent perfecting the mark that will hopefully be gracing your stationary and wooing clients.

I have always been an ambitious student, and even a few years back at the age of just 18, had created my own logo, to be placed onto my letterheads, compliments slips, business cards, and anywhere else I could get it really to try and get my name out there!

This is what my logo from back then looked like;

The idea for this was to create a dynamic shape, which when looked at more closely had more than meets the eye in being an almost 3D relief of an upper-case F.

People responded to it really well, and it transferred onto the business card very easilly, and again in quite a dynamic fashion with the corners cut off.

Upon arriving at Ravensbourne College in September of last year, I felt a need for a change, and quickly smartened up the identity, choosing instead to just use my name as the logo, and laying it out in a simple typographic style;

left – Old ‘F’ logo format, Right – Initial Ravensbourne new card

So with the new identity, I placed this onto my new C.V and covering letters (below) to send out for work experience applications, and with it I managed to get a fair amount of feedback, and have lined up 4 different placements in London studios so far for year.

After getting through the first 2 of my work experience placements (blog post to follow shortly), I thought it was time to spend a little more time creating an identity that hold the professionalism of the new stationary, but at the same time has the dynamic twist of the original identity.

After much experimentation, I looked at my surname as being quite a short, memorable, and usable word, that would apply well to a logo. In all of my sketch-books I tend to work in a rather structured manner, and emphasise areas of important information by drawing large symmetrical arrows, as well as other page structuring methods like line-breaks, typically made up of elements, such as, dotted lines and other styles of lines.

So one day when looking at the 3 characters that make up the name Fox, I instantly saw how the ‘O’ and the ‘X’ were both just shapes really like the game noughts and crosses, and no matter how they were laid out, either vertically or horizontally, they read extremely easilly. So now just to the ‘F’.

I looked at many different styles of fonts to see if there was any way I could show the ‘F’ in a more dynamic fashion, because this would be a very important part of the identity I wanted to communicate to clients about myself. Eventually after many preliminary sketches, I noticed that an upper case ‘F’ is just 3 lines, almost meeting at the same point, and realised that the ‘F’ could become a symmetrical arrow, just like the ones I use so frequently in my sketch-books!

Now the key elements were decided, an arrow, a nought, and a cross, I placed them down together and experimented with stroke-widths and rounded edges etc, and here is my (almost finished) identity.

I decided to place the 3 elements in tabs, to just contain them slightly more, and to allow for a more professional layout that can be carried across many formats without taking over the space, or taking anything away from what-can-now-be a totally free design for the rest of the piece being produced.

…There is still a fair bit of work to go, like deciding whether or not the tabs stay, as well as how to transfer this logo onto my business cards. Also id still like to experiment with how successful the logo might be as perhaps a totally loose and free logo, with the 3 elements allowed to work on their own, or performing different roles around the page.

This is very much a work still in progress, so any input would be more than welcome!

PORTFOLIO: ‘Garnet’ Student Card Brand

Last year, Banko Santander, who recently bought Abbey National, came to us to design them a brand for their all singing, all dancing, new student card. They left the name totally upto us, and we were able to create absolutely anything for the finished article. My brand was called ‘Garnet’, and it took inspiration from the card’s multi-use element. Its ability to be used for banking, student identification, library and travel, made it a valuable asset to any student, so therefore I named it after a precious jewel and took the aesthetics from the warmth and treasure aspects of rare jewels.

The planned poster campaign were very minimal, to create curiosity in those who did not know about the card, but those who were in the know, would feel as though their card was a secret only to them.

The main value of the brand was it’s strong sense of warmth. Students don’t have a lot of luxuries in their lives, so to give them something nice would make it very attractive, and then with it being an important part of their lives I created the brand guidelines with the intention to make it on the level of the student, due to the fact that most students feel unable to talk to their banks with the financial strain university puts them through.

You can download a copy of the brand guidelines here… garnet_brand_guidelines.pdf

(If you do decide to steal any of the ideas used here, the earnest is on the word ‘STEAL’ there, and whereas I will be somewhat flattered by you using my work, you will always know in yourself that you are an inferior designer for not being able to do it yourself …so unlucky, hope you can live with that!)