#d4b

This week I created some rules for my logo. My logo is interesting because it’s rather playful in nature and there’s a lot that can be done with it. I have three possible marks that can be used to represent place and four base colours to play with as well. 

Competitor Analysis

My main competitor for Place is the Nanaimo Entertainment Centre. This is the only sort of location downtown that serves a similar purpose to what I’m going for with Place, even then, it isn’t quite the same. The Entertainment Centre is an old movie theatre that offers the use of the entire building for $500/24 hrs.

Unfortunately for me, the centre does not seem to have any actual branding and is sadly, a building that seems to be in disuse. When I walked through it, I felt this vast feeling inside me, nostalgia for a past I didn’t participate in and awe at the high ceilings. The place is a gem in the downtown core that gets overlooked because the building itself is in disrepair and it is not much to look at from the outside. With some proper branding and some money poured into it, I think it could be a good competitor for what I want Place to be. Still, the goal of the entertainment centre is to offer a rental location for various events in the community for a relatively cheap cost. 

Unfortunately, the competitor analysis for the group that I was in for class was far too different to be of use to me. My group was dealing with tour companies, a museum and a water taxi service so costs and branding were all over the place. My audience is also different as they are not tourists, but members of the community who I want to be tourists in their own city.

So with a chosen logo to work with, I now have to figure out colour. I know these posts have been a little bit long-winded but bear with me here, typing all this out is helping me think as well. 

When working with colour, it’s important to think about emotions you’re trying to get across as well as what your audience is. Since my audience is the community, I want to use colours that are welcoming and friendly.

I started by collecting some colours that I like. I usually do this by looking at other work I’ve done and picking from photos that fit the mood of the project.

Lately, I’ve been really into softer, bright colours. 

These are some of the colour combos that I played with for this project but ultimately, I’ve ended up on the pale yellow, red and blue. They’re a softer take on a fully saturated primary palette. I may use the light pink as well later in some pattern work. 

So step one was to make some rough shapes on my ipad and then bring them into illustrator to make them into vectors. I tried to keep the style similar to the circle so that they would all match well and ended up with this:

Alright, not bad. You’ve got a square to promote balance, structure and in a more abstract sense, community and integrity. The circle represents wholeness, infinity, oneness. The triangle is known to be the strongest shape to build with as any weight placed on them is evenly distributed amongst the sides. Triangles also represent harmony.

Placing them in a line like this makes them look a little like building blocks, or children’s toys. The idea is that you can build Place into a space you need it to be.

Rough: verb.work or shape (something) in a rough, preliminary fashion."flat surfaces of wood are roughed down"

That’s a cool meaning and it applies well to Place because it’s supposed to be a space that you can make your own during use. 

Just to be sure, I also tried out smoothing out the shapes so that I could see whether a rough shape or a smooth shape would be better.

At this point, I’m still undecided. I feel like rough and smooth have very different meenings to me. I like the way the rough one looks because it feels more organic and handmade, which is the type of community I’m trying to promote and reach with place. I want Place to be like a community hub and don’t want it to come across too polished.

So last week, I took my hundred thumbs and whittled them down to three choices. Those three choices didn’t really feel that great so I started working on more thumbs but found that throughout them, I was fixated on geometry. I was drawing cubes, cones, triangles and a lot of circles. I thought that was maybe just me doodling mindlessly.

Perhaps it was or maybe it was my brain compartmentalizing my thinking, literally putting my thoughts into boxes to be taken off the shelf and stacked up later until I had the semblance of a thing. Design, in all of its facets, can be boiled down to one thing: making things. Sometimes our brains make in chunks first and we work so closely with those chunks that we don’t realize there’s a whole big picture we’ve missed until someone else points out what’s been right under your nose all along. 

Last week my prof took my circle design and asked me why I didn’t just continue with that, but with a whole line of slightly wobbly geometry. I want to show you my emotions about that through this excellent clown illustration above by @nerimative on instagram. 

As you can see, it perfectly displays the feeling within when one performs the blunder described by my oma as ‘looking with your nose instead of your eyes’.