Sunday, 22 March 2015

Responsive - Kit Cowey Logo.

My friend Kit, who studies Visual Communication at LCA, asked me to create a logo for him to use alongside his work and to use for his personal brand.

Kit wanted to use his initials within his logo. Although this idea of using initials for self branding is so overdone, I went and looked at examples with of work which do use initials well. After more discussion with kit he stated that he needed a logo that was clean, professional and suitable for his personal brand. He mentioned that his visual communication practice is digitally based design, which meant the design should be digitally composed, instead of using textures and other mediums within it.

Designs that have successfully achieved effective logos that use 2 letters, generally create negative space inside or around one letter and form a second letter by adding or taking away an element. I personally think that these following logos make effective use of initials, some of them have also been implemented in a subtle way.


Kit Cowey's Work  https://www.youtube.com/user/kitkatcowey/videos

Kits focus is with kinetic typography, animation, video & film. Here are some stills and videos from his work.



Kit's main focus is on digital media, film and video. When asking him questions about what titles he would like to go under he mentioned he liked the term 'digital creative'. I will have to use a description on his business card. As he studies visual communication it's hard to pinpoint himself in a specific field of art and design at this stage, because they cover a lot of different methods of communication, but Kit feels comfortable with 'digital creative' as it ties in well with his film/graphic design work.

Here are my first sketches of his initials.

When sketching out ways to combine the initials of his name ( K & C ), I found it difficult for them to mould together and create something subtle. It got frustrating and tiring. I ended up asking kit for more direction with his logo, and suggested the use of cameras to be incorporated into it, as his main focus is videography.Therefore I decided to take a different approach with the logo and try and incorporate cameras into it. After some time experimenting, I came up with the simple idea of just using the crop marks seen through the view finder on the sensor of digital cameras, around his name or initials.

Here are more sketches.
The idea of using the sensor crop marks from digital cameras reminded me of the clothing company 'Midnight'. They have used the same crop marks around their logo in some of their designs. 

I asked for feedback from kit on the new idea of using the digital camera crop marks. He agreed and thought it was a strong concept. He much preferred the idea of using something relevant to his practice within the logo. After talking to kit and finishing my sketches, I started with digitalising them. Here is the development on illustrator & the final digital designs.

Final Design

For the final design I have used the font Calibre. Throughout the development and project, I have been using sans serif fonts for the name because it looks crisp and creates a professional aesthetic. Kit wanted a logo that would represent himself in a formal way and appeal to an audience. I feel that the font I have chosen fits perfectly with the minimal layout and approach I have used for this logo. Calibre can get really bold in the font family, so I only used Medium for 'Kit Cowey' and the light version for 'Digital Creative'. Kerning was also used on the letters to allow for easier reading and to create a better visual presence. Spacing the letters out makes the words in the name stand out, it also creates more space for them to fit around other words and designs easier. 

On the whole I think what I have produced an effective piece of work which is suitable for Kit Cowey's personal branding. I have spoken to kit and he is pleased with the final outcome. As the client for this task was my friend, its likely that he can come back for more improvements if need be. This task was my first time doing a logo for someone else's personal else, other than my own. Creating logo's for somebody else's personal use isn't easy as I sometimes think, trying to represent somebody's specific practice within a design can prove to be difficult at times, especially when there are so many other similar logos out there. This logo task for my responsive module is the smallest project I have completed so far, I gave myself a smaller time frame to complete this by and I think that placing work into certain time scales and objectives is good for practice. This responsive module so far has helped improve my work rate. By having multiple projects overlap with each other it can get too much, however when I start getting stuck into the work starts to clear up, making it easier to arrange time. 


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