LEARNING ACTIVITY

CREATE A LOGO

First off, I made a quick brain map where I did some brainstorming to come up with a name for the dog food product/brand. I think I came up with some good names that sounded good and would work as dog food brand names.

1) ExplorationUse sketching techniques to draw thumbnails and hand in your thumbnails as scanned PDFs.

For the first step of this assignment (after finding some different names to work with) I started out with making six different thumbnails (with three different names of the dog food «brand»), with two thumbnails for each name. I drew some illustrations to experiment with the illustration for the logo, and I have also added the name together with it. These thumbnails are really rough illustrations that I tried to make work as individual logos.

2) FocusHighlight three of the thumbnail ideas that you consider the best options and state why. Hand in an A4 with visuals of the three chosen thumbnails; include reasons for choosing each of these three options.

The first thumbnail (number 4) is a very cute and fun illustration, that shows a happy dog where I have incorporated some hearts. This is both to go with the name I chose in this thumbnail - «Lo-vedog» and to create happy and warm feelings in the viewer. Dog are often referred to as a mans best friend and dog owners wants the best for their dog, and I wanted to show this in the illustra-tion and make the dog seem «filled» with love and looking very happy and cute.

The second thumbnail (number 2) I would consider as one of the best options is a simple dog face with a crown, which I thought reflected the name «Kaiser» (emperor in german) I chose to use in this thumbnail. I liked this thumbnail because it has a strong feeling to it, and it sort of states that your dog is a emperor you will like to please and wish the best for.

The third thumbnail (number 3) I consider as one of the best options I came up with, is a simple paw with a heart in it. Although I think this thumbnail is a bit straight forward and a bit predicta-ble, I liked the look of it and I thought it would work nicely as a logo. For the name of this thumb-nail I chose «Pawpal», and I wanted the illustration to reflect this name.

I wanted to keep the illustrations quite simple and not so detailed, as I thought that the initial logo would have some borders or something to bring the text and the illustration together in a clean and tidy way, and to help with the logo actually looking like a logo when placed on the pro-duct. I wanted to make a logo that wouldn’t disappear or be too much when it is time to place it on a packaging design, so I wanted the logo to have a united and complete look to it so that the logo sort of «speaks for itself» and could easily be recognized and noticed. I think that these three thumbnails were the best options because I simply thought that these were the ones that could make an impactful, recognizable, fun and appealing logo when considering the product I am going to make and the initial thoughts I had for the overall look of the product.

3) ConstructionUse sketching techniques and redraw ONE of your chosen concepts until you’ve reached a conclusion on a successful logo. Hand in your drawings as scanned PDFs.

I chose to redraw the second thumbnail (thumbnail number 2) I chose in the second step of this assignment. This is the first thumbnail with the name ”Kaiser”, as I really liked the name and I thought that the name in combination with the illustration made a very strong and impactful logo. As I mentioned in the second step, I wanted to include some borders in the logo, and in this part of the logo construction I decided to add these borders to see how it turned out and if it would work.

I first made a double rectangle and circled border, but I thought that these two looked a bit to plain/boring and maybe too ”expected” if I could say it that way.

Because I didn’t really think the plain rectangle or the circle bor-ders worked, I decided to try to make the bottom corners more rounded. I think that this worked out very well, and I really got the feeling that this type of border would look good when placed on the dog food packaging. I found it quite difficult to draw this dog face by hand, and I have therefore used the same drawing/text in both these options and I only changed the borders to see the dif-ference between the two options. I felt that because of the overall look of the illustration itself, the best placement of the text would be to center it under the illustration. I wanted the name ”Kaiser” to be with a more script typeface, and the words ”premium me-als” in a simple sans serif (uppercase) typeface.

4) Testing Experiment more with your favourite options from Step 3 and ask the opinion of a few people. Hand in examples of the logos shown to people and write their feedback or opinion on each.

Here I tried to curve the name a bit, with different crowns. People liked the simpler crown (picture 1) best as they felt the crown on the second picture was too empowering and simply stealing too much of the attention in the illustration. I have chosen to keep the (intented) border out of these sketches to see what it looked like.

I also tried out having the name itself in uppercase, and the words ”premium meals” in lowercase. I got some good feedback on the way the text was in this sketch, but here the crown got the thumbs down (same as in the second sketch on this page).

In this sketch I have aligned the text to the left of the illustration on itself (and made a new crown). This sketch didn’t sit that well with the people I asked about how it looked, they said it felt unbalanced (which I agree with).

In this sketch I included the border (from step 3), and this logo recieved some good feed-back. The people I asked for their opinions said that this felt more like a complete logo, but there were some varying opinions about the use of uppercase and lowercase. Some of the people thought that it looked best with the lowercase in the name, and uppercase in the other words below the name, and some of them thought that it looked best this way (I showed them the sketches from step 3 as well for comparison). About everyone I asked also liked the style of the crown in this sketch the best.

5) RefinementChoose your final design and execute it in Adobe Illustrator, along with the name of the product. Hand in your final logo as an A4 PDF.

Here is the final result. After trying out some of the different options in Illustrator (with borders and placement of text), I decided that I actually wanted to keep it quite simple and I therefore came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to add any borders anyway (as I initially had thought I was go-ing to/should do). I wanted the logo to be eye-catching, quite modern and simple (to go with the feeling of the illustration), so I centred the text elements under the illustration and made a simple line between the two separate text elements. I felt that this gave the logo a nice and detailed touch (as I felt the text elements looked a bit «naked» and unfinished», without interfering with the overall look of the logo. I decided to have the name in lowercase, as I felt this made a better and more special overall look of the brand/name than uppercase letters/typeface did. The words «pre-mium meals» have been added in uppercase letters for it to be easier to notice and read.