So here we are at the end of our (admittedly long) journey…

Before we get to the finished thing, we’ll have a look at the last few things I did to get there. This will involve playing with shapes, colours and a couple of fonts.

Actually, while we’re on the subject of fonts — I actually went ahead and chose a combination of Museo and Museo Sans, so that’s that topic addressed already.

Right, so the text has moved to the right of the logo. Since the logo will be appearing predominantly on the web, the logo doesn’t have to shrink too much before the text becomes unreadable—this format will keep the sizes of the text and the logo a bit closer and it will also fit better in the top-right of a typical web layout.

I’ve also gone for a blue for now.

“Let’s liven thing up” I thought to myself. So I tried adding some shapes around the swash. Lots didn’t work, but a nice rounded squares was most promising.

Not exciting enough though. “I’ll skew the crap out of it!” I thought, and so I did.

Looks a bit more interesting, but still not quite the powerhouse of excitement and wonder I was hoping for. Then I decided to take it to a whole new level…

“Now we’re getting somewhere”! This maybe moving away slightly from the idea that logos should have a strong contrast—so they can work on any background colour, but who cares. Besides, it’s totally acceptable these days. I tried some more with the skewed shape too.

I fell in love with this, and decided to try it in some other colours…

Here’s my thoughts, anyway: the red looks a little too Adobe, the green is a little too BP (especially bad at the moment!), but in the end, I settled for the good old blue I’d been using all along.

So there you have it. It’s now 17:13 on a sunny Friday, so rather than waffle on I’m just gonna say “BYE BYE”!

Whilst I still need to move some anchor points around and tweak some curves, the swash logo is nearing completion. So much so that I’ve gone ahead and started testing it with various fonts. As I (think I) said before, my font library is a bit limited, so I’ve had to make do with what I have plus the odd GPL typeface.

I’ve also decided to stick with sans serif typefaces to contrast with the swashy-serif logo. Most of the fonts that have made it to the final choices have ended up being fiarly modern and geometric.

We’ll start with my least favourite, below. The idea of using monospace font Anonymous Sans in a camel case format came from all that coding the rest of the team do.

The problem is, obviously, that the font is mainly intended for use at small sizes in a text editor. As such it doesn’t look that sexy at larger sizes. Also, the idea is kinda cheesy to begin with anyway!

Next up is Quadranta.

Quite modern and geometric, but don’t feel it fits absolutely right myself. I love the lowercase ‘e’ though!

Time for something classic, Helvetica Neue Light.

Well you generally can’t go wrong with a bit of Helvetica, though I might need to play with the kerning a bit.

Let’s switch it up a bit with a touch of slab-serif — Museo 300.

I think this works really well. It’s modern, quirky & sexy — just like our team!

Myriad Pro next, which is one of my current favourite sans typefaces.

Myriad Pro Regular, above, looks solid and modern against the logo. It’s condensed font, below, is sturdy too but looks just a little too corporate for my liking. I mean that’s fine and everything, but it doesn’t really fit our team that well.

Finally, Lovely geometric typeface Geo Sans Light.

Pretty good. Nice and modern looking; and a nice compliment to the logo, but I think the weight is a little too light to stand up to the heavy logo.

Well there’s a lot to think about there, but my clear favourites are:

• Museo — although I’m going to have another look at the 500 weight.
• Myriad Pro Regular.
• Hopefully a slightly thicker alternative to Geo Sans, if I can find one. That happens to be free!

Next time, I’ll be showing off the winning font, and going over what I’ve done with colours. Exciting.

:: EDIT ::

By the way, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in the comments below…

Thanks

I’ve since taken the most promising of the initial ideas and produced some quick mock-ups in Illustrator. It’s worth mentioning that I’m yet to have a proper look at colours and fonts — that’s for the next stage and for now I’ve just used a nice blue. Anyway, the eye-candy ….

The “thought bubbles” and the “labs” balance this logo out quite nicely. I’ll probably put a little more work into this one as I think it could look really good with some refinement and a decent typeface.

Myriad Pro Condensed & Semibold (top). Quadranta Bold & Myriad Pro Semibold (bottom).

The “spot” logo hasn’t come out as well as I thought it might. It reminds me of cheese, and there are spacing issues. As the logo gets smaller (and it will on the web) it begins to get rather cluttered. With some work towards spacing it all out this could be improved, but I don’t think it’ll ever look brilliant. Besides, that letter “l” looks like a lower-case “i”. Rubbish!

However, Museo Sans is looking pretty sexy!

Museo Sans 500, ladies & gentlemen.

I developed the idea of using the initials a little further, removing the spot and joining the letters up in a nice “swishy” ligature style.

I was quite enamoured with this one and took it straight into Illustrator …!

I've used Helvetica Neue Roman for the text.

There’s some messy vector work right there, but it’s only a mock-up. Nevertheless, I think it’s starting to look like a believable logo. It has some nice symmetry, it’s balanced, a little tall maybe but this is definitely going to the next stage. With the right colours, a smart font and some wizardry with the pen tool; we might have ourselves a logo ….

First I thought I’d have a play with the two tittles (the dot above the letter ‘i’) in the word ‘inspire’.

This moved on to a team motif thing, using heads in place of the joining circles. As you can see, I quickly decided that it resembled some sort of crappy crown.

Eventually I decided to leave this direction well alone as I wasn’t happy with how it was looking. The results were a mixture of cheesy and just plain ol’ crummy!

I did however quite like the thought bubble as an idea, so that moved on to the next iteration. I began by plopping it over the letter ‘i’.

I think the top version is the neatest, as the bubbles are contained within the space between the x-height and the cap-height of the text. In the bottom version the thought bubbles look a little tacked on. Granted this is just a sketch, but I don’t really foresee any nice results coming from this solution. So I moved on to playing with the positioning a bit more.

Here I’ve tried moving it above the letter ‘n’ so that the largest bubble sits above the initial ‘I’, serving as a kind of pseudo tittle.

This led me on to the following treatment which would involve a spot logo containing just the ‘I’ and ‘L’ placed next to the text in some way. This solution would look great as a favicon and could potentially work well as a logo.

The next steps will be to consider a colour palette; look at some fonts (there’s no budget for this so I’ll have to rely on what I have!); and to try some of these ideas out in Illustrator. Stay tuned…

I can’t show you the Webuser designs yet so I’ve used Cycling Weekly for this example as the layout is similar. Here’s how the site looks at the moment, complete with a false banner:

First thoughts might be to replace the banner with the leaderboard, leaving the classifieds team with the option of selling either a banner or a leaderboard (as opposed to both). Sounds simple enough, but this doesn’t leave much room for the logo:

The site’s branding becomes completely dominated by the leaderboard as the size of the logo has to be reduced. Bear in mind also that there is little control on exactly what a leaderboard will look like when you’re filling them with classified adverts, so the result could be even worse once you get some nice bright flashing colours in there! Next option is usually to move the entire site down and put the leaderboard at the top:

Just plonking it in the centre, as above, makes me uncomfortable though. It feels like an afterthought (which in this case it sort of is!), is out of alignment with the rest of the site and thus ruins any sense of grid spacing. Other options then would be to align it to the left or right – which would leave us with an empty space to one side. We could perhaps use this space as some kind of promo area to some feature of the site. Whilst this is a sound idea, it still has it’s pitfalls.

In this arrangement we run the risk of affecting or complicating the branding by placing a related promo box directly above the logo. This option is acceptable as long as the contents of the promo is handled in such a way as to not confuse the logo.

Here we could have the same problem with having an ad directly above the logo, which could potentially be anything. Add to this the complete seclusion of the promo between two ads. This arrangement has actually been used on one of the Southbank team’s websites: Woman & Home. Surely the promo box here will suffer greatly from ‘ad blindness’ and be regularly ignored by users assuming it’s simply another advert. The header section of Woman & Home also features a newsletter sign up box on the right under the promo – I can’t help but feel this gives a sense of fragmentation to the header section.

A brief google search on the matter yielded no results, but I’m going to look into this in more as I’m going to need an elegant design solution to this as I know it will be an occurring problem with every redesign…