What is it about a logo that draws the attention of peoples memories. Is it color, shape or the overall graphic impact of the image. The thing about a logo is that it is always associated with a name, even when there is no name associated with the logo. So if I say swoosh, you are probably thinking Nike. How about peacock? Hopefully a free association will result in the bird, but when we mention logos, you immediately associate it with the NBC logo.
So if a logo is such a powerful image to brand a company, serious thought must go into the development of that brand. After all, once a brand has been publicly accepted, the public will only accept a small amount of variance in the brand. Shape is the first and most most important of the design process. In the January 4th, 2010 post called Times Are A Changing I discussed the process of our decision to rebrand. But I will cover the process used to develop the two different logo's.
First I spent some time in engineering and architectural design and the following logo is a direct result of that discipline as you can see below.
Ok, so it might be a little over the top in the sizing thing but lets keep on going here. I wanted a subdued patriotic color scheme and came up with the red, blue, and grey rather than white. The colors bars were a takeoff on the three colors and a gradient had too be established and recorded for reproduction.
Here is that gradient from the Photoshop gradient tool adjustment panel. It is not shown here but The ratios have numeric values to recreate this gradient exactly. With the logo goes a name and I figured it might just as well include the color gradient to keep the two together.
The arrows indicated the start, stop, and drag position of the gradient tool. This provides consistence within the logo and name. The gradient was established to define the three different words in the name. Red to blue happens around the D and blue to grey happens at the P. Cool, great, worked really good, but what was the problem.
It was blocky with a cumbersome long name. It did not represent a free flowing and artistic style we want to convey to to viewers of the site and our brand. It was time to make a shift in our branding. This is what we did in presenting PeekFoto. The name has a nice bounce to it but was quite unexpected in its origin. When I went to register peekphoto.com it was already taken but peekfoto.com was available. Once the web presence was established, people began to think the name of the company was PeekFoto. With a minor application to the State of Michigan we acquired a D.B.A. of PeekFoto. So with a new name, a logo change was in order. This took an evening in a hotel room with me scribbling the P and reversed F on a note pad. This you can see below.
Once these were complete, I took a picture of the sheets of paper and loaded them into Photoshop. Working with levels and changing colors to make them more definable and usable in Photoshop is represented in the following image.
This let me isolate and save both the PF and PeekFoto names on different layers and ultimately different files. The start, stop and drag arrow was going to be a his and moss proposition. It took about eight or ten drags to finally get the gradient to look the way we liked it.
The name was a totally different story. Reversing the "f" had to be done to maintain the continuity of the brand. Being a graphic it is fine as is the "R" in Toys-R-Us. The gradient had to be dragged to separate the two names thought. What you see here and above are a flat image for a matt presentation.
The original brand will remain as Peek Digital Photography, LLC. is the legal name of the company and is being treated as an umbrella company just in case we venture into commercial or another form of photography. While there is a very technical side of photography, it is really the artistic eye supported by the technical strengths of the photographer that makes a god photog.
Well, there is the what, why, and how of one companies logo development. Much thought and effort will always go into a nice presentation, it just doesn't happen on its own.
That pretty well wraps it up foe me this morning, so I'll cya tomorrow... Doug
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