#codeartists

It was about time! Time for what? To make a visual identity for our group that's making products that is.

This is the final result.

I've been struggling with what to do in terms of iconography and meaning. The brand name itself has two pretty juxtaposed words you could say. Code and artists. But the point here is that we combine both aspects into a beautiful whole. The identity should thus reflect this.

This is the avatar, the square, the icon in different shades.

The process

In my mind I was playing with the idea of an artists brush, maybe drawing 0's and 1's in some pattern, but those ideas quickly faded, because it would involve some drawing which I'm just not any good at.

Also my style has always been utterly simple, clean and primarily typography based. You can see that clearly showing on the DoubleRecall, TimeKiwi and my own personal identity.

So one day, I woke up and I said sans-serif and serif! Huh, not much of an epiphany, eh?

But what I had in my head, visually, was a strong and technically set word Code and then sort of beautifully, maybe italicized Artists. To me this was the embodiment of both words.

I later of course refined the idea to use a monospaced font for Code and started playing with various brackets after Patricija reminded me of this subtlety.

All that was left now, was the color scheme. I already knew I wanted to use a shade of black for Code and some bright, a little crazy maybe, artistic color for Artists. I was looking through some of the color palettes that Illustrator comes fitted with and after giving up on Impressionism and Baroque I stubmled upon Pop Art.

But I wasn't satisfied with this. I wanted maybe something more stylized, so I tried playing with Futura as the Code font and got into this square, circle thingie :-D

It sucked. I wasn't impressed and I'm sure McKayla wasn't as well.

So I first went for a change of color, when I explored the Pop Art palette as a joke. I actually quite like this iteration. It's solid.

And the georges serifs of the Justus type don't hurt. Couple of problems here though:

no idea how to do a logo/icon

T-Mobile wants magenta just for themselves (seriously, read about it)

So I finally add the (round) brackets and start playing with them. I wasn't satisfied.

Then I put curly brackets in the game and a semicolon and things started to look right. I also switched the magenta to a more not T-Mobileish.

I settled on the latter, but you already know that from the beginning of the post. Mostly because I had better options to do the icon.

I'm happy with it now and as a bonus, typographic logos such as this one can be always written anywhere like code { artists }, which doubles the fun.