Category: Logo design
Still Water Yoga: Building the Brand Identity
Designing a brand identity is the chance to emphasize key elements that should be repeated, and add in elements that could not be part of the logo design.
Read More...New Logo Design: Still Water Yoga Portland
We’re really excited about our logo design for a new yoga studio here in Portland, Maine. Joseph and Candace Satlak, the owners of Still Water Yoga Portland (yeah, we designed their web site too, more about that in a later post) were great clients to work with, and I thought you might enjoy seeing the process behind the brand identity and logo design. Branding research Before we start working on a logo design, we want to learn more about how an organization is trying to position themselves relative to their competition. In this case, our client had already spent a great deal of time looking at the other yoga studios in Portland, Maine as part of their business planning. They knew what made them different and what type of client they wanted to attract. We helped them refine that vision and turn it into something visual. They wanted to emphasize: waterfront location their individualized, friendly and comfortable approach that […]
Read More...Eastern Mountain Sports Rebrand
Eastern Mountain Sports has a new logo, and I hate it! My love affair with Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS) In the summer of 1991, a good friend and I planned a 10-day road trip as a way to celebrate the start of our senior year at Carleton College. I used money I had saved from my summer job to buy a tent. I had very little camping or tenting experience when I headed into EMS’s Boston store. But the people working in the store were helpful and assured me that I’d be able to put up my new tent easily. The salesperson explained that the beauty of the tents they sold were how easy they were to put up, and he quickly walked me through the process. After taking it apart and stuffing it back into the sack, he said “You can put this tent up in less than 3 minutes.” I balked, reminding him that I didn’t have […]
Read More...Do Simple Logos Cost Less?
I can’t tell you how frequently clients come to me and say: I just want a simple logo. Nothing fancy or complex, just simple. The expectation is that a simple logo design will cost less than a complex one. Let me explain why this is not usually the case. First of all, the mark of a well-designed logo is its simplicity. While this is not always true, it is true more often than not. If you look at the iconic logos of our time, they are universally simple. Think of FedEx, Nike or the Apple logos. The work of a professional designer is to distill the elements of a logo to it’s simplest form, yet still keep it unique and recognizable. Often, a less trained designer, and therefore less expensive designer, is unable to do this. To design a strong brand identity, we need to start by doing a full exploration. The process for creating logos can take a long […]
Read More...Branding Case Study: ClaimVantage
Recently, we completed a branding upgrade for our client ClaimVantage. ClaimVantage is a software company that has developed a claims processing solution that runs on the cloud-based force.com platform. The company has offices in both Portland, Maine and Dublin, Ireland. We’ve been working with ClaimVantage for more than a year and the branding process was part evolution, part revolution. When we first started working together we helped them with a “clean up” of their web site. But at that time they didn’t have the budget for a complete rebuilding of their brand identity. So the web design upgrade was modest. Then in early 2011 they scored a grant from Enterprise Ireland, giving them them the funding to help redesign their logo and web site completely. Research Like with all of our branding projects, we started with research into their competitors and target audience. Although our clients always know a lot about this, we prefer to do our own research to […]
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