OUGD403 – Studio brief 1

Logotype

For my re-brand I chose to do subway, the reason I chose subway is because their logo has been the same for as long as I can remember and overall it just doesn't look very inviting in terms of being for a fast food sandwich company, the main reason I think this is because of the garish yellow and dark green used in the logo.

Therefore my aim for this re-brand was:

"Create a more succinct, contemporary logo that appears refreshing"

To begin with, I went to subway and took pictures within the shop mainly looking at the applications of the current logo. These included napkins, bags, cups and the paper the sandwich was wrapped up in. Other uses included the shop front signage and the employee’s uniform.

After this I looked into the company’s history and the story behind the name so I could decide if any of these factors would influence any of my design decisions. As subway is such a popular and well recognised company I decided not to change the name and it has fairly substantial reasoning behind the name (submarine sandwich made your way; Subway) As for the history of the company, I wanted to find out where it was originated and if this would have any impact on the style of my design. My initial idea was to do something related to the new York subway and Helvetica as I though subway would have originated in new York. The actual company was founded in Connecticut, however it is thought that the sub sandwich itself could have originated in new York so I decided to keep that avenue open.

After identifying the applications of the logo I needed my design to be legible on large and small scale and not too complicated.

My first design is based on Helvetica, I gave it a quite tight kerning as there are normally some problems with ‘b’ and ‘w’ next to each other and I wanted the word to be as cohesive as possible. I wanted to incorporate the arrow as a link to the old design so modified the ascender to flow seamlessly into an underline/ arrow. I like this design but I think it is too simple so would need some further development.

In order to make it look more like a sandwich shop, for my next design I took inspiration from a restaurant called Byron burgers and the font they use.

I was able to find a similar font called Porter. From a student’s point of view the price range at subway is fairly expensive considering what it is and you could easily get a sandwich with fresher ingredients elsewhere for cheaper so I decided to keep the kerning on this logotype quite loose to give the feel of a more expensive food branch. I also did a variation with lines in order to make it look more up market. To give the design more context I did a version where the design was placed on a rustic wood background.

 Subway recently brought out a new sandwich called the new beef pastrami melt inspired by New York. I really like the front of the use on their promo posters and decided to take inspiration to create something similar. I found a font called Air Americana resembled the one used in the promo posters.

There were some issues with the lettering especially on the B and the A and so I edited them in Adobe illustrator until I was happy with them and they looked more streamline. The font is oblique and I felt that worked well with subway being a fast food chain but also the layout of the service where you go from left to right to make the sandwich.

Again I wanted to incorporate an arrow into the design so I added a simple underline that doubled as an arrow. I think this could be devolved with more time in order to find a way to incorporate it in a more seamless way and in a way that looks better.

 Looking at the promo posters again I noticed there is a stripe down the middle of the letters and I really liked this aspect and decided to add this to this typeface.

I really liked how this turned out and I thought that if the lines where changed into lighting it could work well as signage.

After doing research into colours that stimulate hunger, orange and green were at the top.

The darker green and yellow are the original colours for subway, i feel like the dark green in no way represents the 'freshness' of the brand that they are trying to promote so i opted for a lighter green and the orange as a potential alternative.

I liked the green the most as it looks the most light and refreshing and retains some of the original brand identity.

Feedback

Overall my feedback told me that my re-brand was successful and i managed to achieve the aims i had set out for myself. All the comments we're positive and agreed with my choice of final resolution which was very reassured me and gave me confidence in my design. However there were two issues that quite a few people picked up on. the first was the colour, although it was agreed that the lighter green was definitely better that the original subway green, there were concerns that it would stand out very well. The second concern was with the lines in the middle of the text, on a smaller scale it was hard to see that they were there. If I were to revisit this i would rectify the aspects of the design that were flagged up as issues by increasing the stroke weight of the line and choosing a darker green that is lighter than the original green used by subway but that is still noticeable.

Experimental Jetset Whitney Rebrand.

Initially, I felt that it was visually heavy on the left hand side as it has the bold text of the 'Whitney, and on the right, is just open, white space. However the bold text versus the slim, sleek 'W, compliment each other.

The Simplistic, sleek, modern look means it works well in black and white and would also work well in many other colours and is very versatile in terms of the colour choice to compliment the logo.

They made the decision to not keep the form of the 'W' so depending on the context the 'W' acts as plynth to showcase the work holding it up or wrapping around the work to frame it. The zig zag is also shorthand symbol for all kinds of instructions from musical notation to stage directions, therefore represents the diverse content of the whitney museum.

As it is, the logo looks really formal however when put into context and the 'W' is distorted it becomes more playful and informal meaning that.

Obviously as we have a certain level of visual literacy, lot of these factors that we've noticed may go unnoticed however. i think that adds to the how effective the rebrand is.  The 'W' frames the work so well it almost goes unnoticed. The W achieves the aims set out by the designers on a number of levels it reflects the architecture of the building and it works seamlessly with the artwork in order to frame it and advertise it successfully. Overall I think this was a very successful rebrand.

OUG403 - Study Task One Feedback.

Feedback.

Overall, the main points of our peer feedback were:

- Good research into the company and understanding of the companies services and dedication to customer service.

- Thorough research into typeface and colour and  justification of design decisions.

-Good experimentation regarding colour and the name change and was agreed that our choice was the most effective out of our experiments

-The use of the flame within the counted was visually effective and didn't effect legibility.

- There could have been more images within our presentation and less writing.

- Could have done more research into other companies i.e. naming conventions. 

Tutor feedback:

- Good observation and critiques about current logo however we said the current logo was unfriendly but we didn't say why.

- Presentation could have less text and could have been replaced with visual examples.

- Good investigation into use of colour

- Good use of type terminology.

- The kerning needs improving

- Some felt the blue and the idea of 'heat' were contradictory.

General feedback to the class:

Outstanding presentation skills but more confidence is needed in the work we have created. we were enthused and passionate about the work but need to avoid using terms such as 'nice' and 'good'. 
We need to consider and reflect on the most difficult aspect of the task
Try and link design decisions to recognised theory and avoid over complicating things.

Typographic Lectures

The session began with an introduction into typographic terminology which gave me a better understanding of the anatomy of type and the ability to talk about typefaces and their specific traits in more detail. The different variables surrounding type such as leading and kerning, were also discussed and a TED talks by John Maeda demonstrated how the typeface, size, colour and kerning can effect the context in which a word is viewed. 

We also discussed what the difference was between a typeface and a font, the agreed definition being that a font refers to a family of typefaces ie Helvetica is the font, Helvetica neue is a typeface. Also a font refers to the physical embodiment such as the computer file and the typeface is what you see displayed on the screen.

We watched another TED talks by graphic and type designer Andrew Byron called "if H is a chair" which talks about seeing objects differently and applying them to type. He also discussed how limitiations can sometimes influence deign which is an interestung concept that could be carried through into my own practice.

OUGD403 - Study Task One

We were given our first study task, in groups and in competition with two others, we were required to re brand a "boring company" that sponsors Leeds United using only type and one of Vignelli's 6 basic type faces. Our group was given the company help-link and we spent the remainder of the session creating a mind map as a basis for our project.

The first thing we did was Google help-link and write down out initial thoughts about the current logo and find out the specific information about our company.

There were a few areas that we had to consider:
- mission statement/unique selling point
- Values
- Vision
- Personality

The personality of the company included things like their visual identity. Are they a friendly company or corporate? The tone of voice used on the website, formal or informal? The dialogue between the company and the customer, is it one way communication or does the customer have a say? These were all things we discussed in depth amongst the group and thing we took into consideration when making out design. 

The main problems we identified were:

- The name 
- The mix of upper case and lower case 
- The kerning 
- The '.co.uk' underneath the main logo

We had a problem with the name as we felt it wasn't very representative of the company, we initially thought it was some sort of IT company and not a heating company as none of the works convey anything to do with company.

The mix of upper and lower case is unsightly and there doesn't seem to be any reason behind the design decision that we can think of to justify this choice.

The irregular kerning makes the logo look amateurish and again looks unsightly as the letters look disjointed.

As we are in the digital age and most companies have websites the need for the '.co.uk' has been lost and is unnecessary, it makes the logo look less fluid and unbalanced as it is underneath the main type.

We decided to resolve the issue regarding the name before trying out any experiments with type. In order to do this we looked at the company websites 'About' page in order to identify the core values of the company and to gain inspiration for the name change. We narrowed this down to a few key words such as heat, energy,power etc

We decided that the word 'heat' would be most suitable as it is the most accurate reflection of the companies services which is central heating. Our first option was to just change 'Help' to 'Heat' to become 'Heat-link' but as a group we decided that it still didn't accurately represent the company.

So following suit with the help-link name we decided to pick a second word to follow the word heat.We started looking into words that reflected their attitude towards their customers and service. As they pride themselves on their customer care and being customers first choice we looked into words such as trust, first, plan etc. Out of these we felt the word that best fit and was the most effective was 'first' and so we had decided on the name change of 'heatfirst' 

This brought us onto the design process and our next task was to pick a suitable typeface. The company is fairly new and still expanding so we initially decided that a serif font wouldn't be appropriate as they are closely associated with companies that have a long standing history. Also we felt that a target audience of the company are perhaps new house owners who are looking to upgrade to a new more efficient boiler, therefore a typeface that would appeal to a younger audience eg 25-30. The design of the current website include a sans serif font for the content of the site and they also have fairly minimalist/simple icons, another reason we decided a more modern/sleek type face was the way to go.

So out of the 6 basic typefaces that left us with the choice between helvetica and futura. We compared the two typefaces and decided that futura has a more rounded appearance and that fit well with the friendly aspect of the company that we were trying to convey.

The two experiments in black are in Helvetica, jut to make sure we were content with our choice of Futura and at this point we agreed we wanted to stick with Futura.

We decided on our final resolution for many reasons:

firstly we decided on the colour blue as we didn't feel like the orange worked because it separated the words too much and we wanted 'heat' and 'first' to be as cohesive as possible. As their main focus is central heating we though a blue colour would be best to represent gas. We chose blue over orange because as a group we felt that blue had connotations with feelings of trust and reliability, company aims that we wanted to put across to the the customer.

The decision to make the words as cohesive as possible also lead us to keep the words side by side a opposed to on top of each other.

We wanted to keep the flame from the original logo and we felt that adding it in would give the our logo a little more 'heat' as we identified that blue could come off as quite a cold colour. After our typographic lecture we were inspired to try and incorporate the flame into negative space as opposed to at the side or above etc. therefore keeping the logo concise.
We decided to link the T up to an underline for two reasons:

The first being we wanted to maintain the 'link' aspect of the company and the links they have to helping out and giving back to the local community and also the pride they put into open communication with the customer.
The second for visual reasons, the word 'first' is in a lighter shade of blue and we didn't want it to be drowned out by the darker 'heat' so we felt having the line kept the two words cohesive.