Brief 12 - Session

Today we had a full day session with the five creative directors to look at our concepts and how far we had got with it all.

In preparation, we had created an A3 sheet with all of our different logo ideas, showing the variations we had created since we got the brief.

We were quite confident in that we had an idea that we all agreed on and could work with. We all agreed on the following visual to be our logo design.

Following this, we each continued with development. I tried various colour changes and tried out different typefaces to accompany the logo.

The typeface decided upon was Avenir Bold, one which Sam had been using and we all agreed that it worked well. At this point I felt that the type wasn't working in this format. When trying to include the city name, I found it was hard to incorporate it successfully. With this, I tried a different format of text.

This design was agreed on by the whole group, with a positive reaction so we decided to move forward with it. I changed the type to grey to mirror the grey dots in the logo.

Following the agreement on this design, Ant created a short animated version of the identity. The concept we had for this is that, in reference to a map, the four grey dots would start in the points of origin of each city, and then they would move into place, the colours fade in, followed by the text.

Animated Logo

We showed this video and the logo variations to the creative directors, and spoke about them in depth when we were sat with just one for half an hour.

We discussed the concept, and he pointed out that we are trying to incorporate too much into the one thing, and if we were worried about the fact our logo resembled the London Underground, we should perhaps think about something else as this is something everyone will see instantly.

Following this meeting, we decided to do a brain storm of everything about the brief that we wanted to get across, moving with the idea of 'better together' - the four cities are better together.

This left us at a point where we were pretty unsure as to what to do and what direction to go in. We felt we had a good direction at the beginning of the day, but this was all changed when the flaws in it were shown. We decided that the main points we wanted to get across were unity, development and growth.

We had another talk with another of the creative directors, who pointed out that actually in our one concept, we had four different concepts and ideas, and it would be better to focus on just one. We went through the four with him, and realised that two of them were strong - 4 in 1, and 'stronger together'.

It was said that our logo showed connection, something quite unoriginal as a lot of other groups had thought of the same kind of thing. The first two ideas we had were there because they are very easy to visualise and create something. The last two - the better concepts - these are the ones which are much harder to create something visual for, and that is the challenge we have.

As our audience is everyone, the actual design of the identity doesn't necessarily matter as long as we have a strong and thoughtful concept behind it. It was said that it won't be just designers looking at it, and normal people would not ever sit and think about an identity design in the way we do.

We found that throughout the day, a few different people had commented that they liked the use of gradients in our logo's - particularly the bottom left logo on the A3 sheet of variations (at the top). This is something that we can potentially build on. We were also unsure as to use one colour - to represent unity - or four colours - to represent each city coming together.

Following this session we have decided that it will be good for us to each do our own individual development again, without sharing this with the rest of the group, so we can generate more visual ideas for our chosen concept. While we have each done individual development before, it had always been on the same idea and with the same visuals, so this is a chance for us to each come up with something on our own and have four completely different ideas on how to take this forward.