Studio Brief 1 - Interim whole class Crit

17.10.16

As an opportunity to get a larger body of feedback from a variety of people, we set up our laptops with our work on and left a few questions that we wanted people to focus on about our designs. I set up my display to show 8 variations of the logotype for the watch brand - Adjourn. I also presented two watch faces as a mock up in context, allowing the viewers to envision the intended use of the logotype. The mockups provide a better understand and allow the feedback to be more useful to me as the designer when developing the idea further. 

Logotypes shown in crit

Logotype in context

A short list of bullet points about the word and branding idea (figure 1) was left next to my presentation so that comments could be made as to whether or not the logotype displays the intended meaning. 

The questions were:

-Does it look better all uppercase, lowercase or just capitalised 'A'?

-Should the symbol have contrasting strokes to match the typeface?

-Would tight kerning or spaced kerning represent the brands intentions more successfully? 

The feedback showed that all uppercase letters would be most suitable to represent that the brand is high-end. A lot of current high-end fashion brands use uppercase letters in the logotype, so this may have lead to an association from those giving feedback on my work; showing the power of branding and how we associate things to mean something in particular. To further develop my ideas, letter sizing would need to be experimented with to see if all the same size looks better worse. 

Figure 1

In regards to the contrasting line widths of the symbol, there was a mixed result. It was thought that by having the high contrasted line thicknesses it would work better alongside the typeface and appear to be definitely part of it. The original symbol for the word 'sirius' is constructed of even line thicknesses, but to potentially modernise the symbol and make it particular to the brand, it may look better if it was to be manipulated. 

The other opinion was that keeping the lines of the symbol all one thickness may work better to reduce the chance of the logotype looking too 'busy'. To develop the idea and see which works better, a direct comparison would be the most appropriate way to decide if trying thicknesses would be too busy visually. 

It was suggested that the symbol could work being inside the 'o' as it would look like the watch face, associating it with how it will be seen in context. This makes the branding strong as people begin to remember the small details about the branding. I will have to experiment with this idea because if the logotype is to ever be displayed very small then the symbol may go unnoticed. This will then make the brand identity much weaker than it should be. 

The kerning of this logotype is a very important factor as it can instantly change the purpose, quality and message portrayed to the target audience, potentially causing it to appear as something other than a high-end watch brand. It seemed evident that spaced kerning represents a higher level of sophistication, something a high-end watch brand should be aiming to be. 

It was also thought that the spaced kerning could represent the meaning of the word well, the spaces could represent the 'slowing down or something'/'dragging something out', which is essentially 'postponing' something. 

Figure 2

Figure 2 was mentioned as being the best example of the spaced and sophisticated kerning. To develop this design further, I would look at spacing it slightly more as the existing companies that the research was based on had slightly more spaced kerning than I have used in figure 2. 


Development sketches leading on from critical feedback:

 

I feedback suggested that I needed to look at developing the symbol so that it fits better with the stroke widths of the Bodoni font. 

I will match it exactly with the size of the writing for the final one, but these sketches show the process of decided which arrangement of lines works best. 

Just the 1 thicker line does not make it obvious that it was designed like that to match the font, so maybe the bottom line works better in that sense. 

I think that the bottom line arrangements work effectively, but with the middle 'c' shaped design. These two elements joined together would represent the brand well, making the symbol powerful enough to stand alone on a watch face and have the ability to be recognised.