Logo Starter - Logo Development & Crit

After looking into various examples of logos, packaging used for photographic film and the branding of Ilford / Kodak, I decided to look into my favourite logo/branding design book called 'marks of excellence' published by Phaidon. I found a few more examples of old logos used for photographic equipment companies, which I had never come across before. The Leica logo has always featured the extended stroke of the L that follows underneath the rest of the joined letters. The Carl Zeiss logo is an old version of what they use now and is completely different. The phase one logo makes use of the space inside the O and places the number 1 inside it, which puts more emphasis on the number itself as the word spells 'one' as well. I really like the simplicity of this logo and I think it makes for a strong design.

VHS Aesthetic

I was talking to danny about how I am aiming for a strong logo, which is crisp but also resembles a slight vintage aesthetic too because photographic film is analogue and many of the existing designs for logos/packaging have a retro feel to them. I had already started looking into old VHS tape designs that used patterns of shapes, gradients and the sans serif company logos on the packaging. He recommend that I look into the designs used on old stereo systems from the 80s. I think the use of shapes in the designs for the stereo systems are real funky, however I'm not sure that it's exactly what I'm trying to achieve. I want to try and implement shapes into my logo designs, although I think it's hard to stick to a design for a logo which includes shapes, because they might not look right when being used on packaging and other printed formats. I aim to play around with shapes, lines and colours for the logo, but I don't want to deduct from the bold, clean design I want to portray. 

When researching into the old vhs packaging designs I found that the TDK logo stood out to me the most out of all the designs, mainly because it only consists of 3 bold letters. I like how it's shortened down to an acronym instead of having the full name of their company, which is actually Tokyo Denki Kagaku. I'm not too keen on the name of Cinestill Film and I think the way they currently use the logo with just the name isn't effective. I could perhaps do a similar thing that TDK have done and make Cinestill Film into an acronym like CSF. Having the name shortened down allows more to have more freedom and options to experiment with when designing the logo. I think it will make for a more impactful design with just using the 3 letters. However the actual name will have to be used as well, otherwise people wouldn't be able to understand what the letters stand for. 

Logo Ideas & Drawings
When starting with logo design, I stick to starting on paper and sketching things out. It helps get things clearer in my mind. I tried playing with ideas that included recognisable parts of the camera such as the aperture and also thought about the use of sprocket holes used in photographic film. However the use of 35mm/sprocket holes has been over done in logo design for camera film. Cinestill already have it incorporated on their rolls of film. Different ways of presenting the Cinestill name typographically were also considered when sketching out these initial ideas.

here are the initial logo designs I created in illustrator. 

I used serif fonts as well as sans serifs for the name to see how they both worked in terms of representing the logo in a clear way. Kentmere use a serif for their logo and their aesthetic is quite crisp, so I thought I would try and emulate it with a serif font. Because of this I discovered a new serif I had never come across before called Monotype Modern Std. I really dig how this font looks. (check underneath the group of 8 sans serif logo) I used helvetica, Univers, Frutiger and another sans serif called Folio, which was new to me too. I found these 2 fonts I was unfamiliar with by scrolling through the font folio because I wanted to play with something new. However out of the 4 sans serif fonts, I feel that the Univers version does it justice best. I used the CSF acronym with these type faces and they come across more effective than the rest of the ideas/drafts in my opinion. Underneath the CSF I placed 'Cinestill Film' in 2 fonts, which are Helvetica Neue and Letter Gothic. I preferred the Letter gothic version that goes with the Univers letters. 

In the crit people said I should continue the use of the shapes and play around with them more. People also liked the idea of using the company name as an acronym. Simon also said that it looked quite professional and that the set of logos in the corner looked like a branding guideline.

Next I'm going to Experiment further with shapes/lines and see how I progress on from there.