OUGD603 Helena Wrench Branding - Colour Theory - Live Brief (Brief Two)

The client has already discussed that she doesn't have a specific colour scheme in mind, so for this reason I have creative control with this specific aspect of the design. She has, however, suggested that the colour scheme be gender neutral to apply to a wider demographic.

Below are some colour mock ups.

It became clear that the above colour schemes were not successful as they used too many colours, and generally lost the effect of the ladder. For this reason, it will be best to keep the logo one specific colour and change the colour of the background. This will be useful for business cards and the general branding of the rest of the collateral as it will keep each consistent with another, and therefore make the brand memorable.

Above are some colour schemes that I have played with now. The colour is in CMYK as the collateral for the client will all be print. This means that the colour scheme will be duller than if it was viewed online, however I think this is successful as it washes out a lot of the colours and they become pastel, which is something the client incorporates in a lot of her interior design.

This is the chosen colour. This was chosen as it is bright, bold and represents the bold colours that the client uses in her interior design. I will confirm this colour with the client before creating business cards and progressing with the collateral of the project further.

OUGD603 Helena Wrench Branding - Choosing A Typeface - Live Brief (Brief Two)

Helvetica.

Futura Medium.

Futura Bold.

Gill Sans.

Open Sans.

Berthold.

After looking at these typefaces with the logo design, it was a toss up between Berthold and Futura. Both are very geometric typefaces and work successfully with the logo design. Having looked at these closer, however, the chosen typeface will have to be Futura because it is a lot more geometric and fits with the style of the logo design a lot more.

OUGD603 Helena Wrench Branding - Logo Development - Live Brief (Brief Two)

Now that the client has approved the concept for the logo design, I am going to start working on it on Illustrator. 

Things I still need to keep within the logo design: minimalism and relevance.

Below is the logo design that I drew by hand. It's not great at this stage, however with some work I think it could become really successful and perfect for the client.

I then mocked the logo up using the typeface Harbour. This isn't successful, however it's definitely on the right path.

I then experimented with created a logo with both Helena's initials. This is unsuccessful due to the stroke thickness and it also isn't slick or minimal like requested.

This is definitely a lot more slick, however it isn't very central which irritates me as a designer. I don't think it's a very successful logo design as of yet, and it also doesn't answer the brief of making an icon as it is still very type-based.

Below is a similar design as the above, however the H has been elongated to represent a ladder more. This is definitely better than the previous.

This looks a lot better to me as it is now central due to the box around the letterform, however it still looks too much like a letter for my personal preference.

This is the same H put into a square that cuts off the serifs. This is a lot more successful, however it irritates me that the centre of the H is thinner than the rest of the letterform.

I then inverted this. It's still irritating, however it looks a lot better and more as a shape than a letterform.

I then made the thickness of the letterform the same for every element. This is 100% better than any previous design, however I believe it loses the essence of the ladder due to the gaps between each shape.

For this reason, I added the lines back into the shape. This is very successful and I believe the most successful logo icon created. I am going to send it to Helena to get her opinion, however I think she will like it due to the fact it answers everything that she requested from a logo, and it also incorporates an element of herself due to the letter H being visible.

OUGD603 Plato Cosmetics - Further Research: Atlantis - Collaboration / Research (Brief Three)

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/archaeology/atlantis/

If the writing of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato had not contained so much truth about the human condition, his name would have been forgotten centuries ago.

But one of his most famous stories—the cataclysmic destruction of the ancient civilization of Atlantis—is almost certainly false. So why is this story still repeated more than 2,300 years after Plato's death?

"It's a story that captures the imagination," says James Romm, a professor of classics at Bard College in Annandale, New York. "It's a great myth. It has a lot of elements that people love to fantasize about."

Plato told the story of Atlantis around 360 B.C. The founders of Atlantis, he said, were half god and half human. They created a utopian civilization and became a great naval power. Their home was made up of concentric islands separated by wide moats and linked by a canal that penetrated to the center. The lush islands contained gold, silver, and other precious metals and supported an abundance of rare, exotic wildlife. There was a great capital city on the central island.

There are many theories about where Atlantis was—in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Spain, even under what is now Antarctica. "Pick a spot on the map, and someone has said that Atlantis was there," says Charles Orser, curator of history at the New York State Museum in Albany. "Every place you can imagine."

Plato said Atlantis existed about 9,000 years before his own time, and that its story had been passed down by poets, priests, and others. But Plato's writings about Atlantis are the only known records of its existence.

POSSIBLY BASED ON REAL EVENTS?

Few, if any, scientists think Atlantis actually existed. Ocean explorer Robert Ballard, the National Geographic explorer-in-residence who discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, notes that "no Nobel laureates" have said that what Plato wrote about Atlantis is true.

Still, Ballard says, the legend of Atlantis is a "logical" one since cataclysmic floods and volcanic explosions have happened throughout history, including one event that had some similarities to the story of the destruction of Atlantis. About 3,600 years ago, a massive volcanic eruption devastated the island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea near Greece. At the time, a highly advanced society of Minoans lived on Santorini. The Minoan civilization disappeared suddenly at about the same time as the volcanic eruption.

But Ballard doesn't think Santorini was Atlantis, because the time of the eruption on that island doesn't coincide with when Plato said Atlantis was destroyed.

Romm believes Plato created the story of Atlantis to convey some of his philosophical theories. "He was dealing with a number of issues, themes that run throughout his work," he says. "His ideas about divine versus human nature, ideal societies, the gradual corruption of human society—these ideas are all found in many of his works. Atlantis was a different vehicle to get at some of his favorite themes."

The legend of Atlantis is a story about a moral, spiritual people who lived in a highly advanced, utopian civilization. But they became greedy, petty, and "morally bankrupt," and the gods "became angry because the people had lost their way and turned to immoral pursuits," Orser says.

As punishment, he says, the gods sent "one terrible night of fire and earthquakes" that caused Atlantis to sink into the sea.

OUGD603 Plato Cosmetics - Documentary: Atlantis - Collaboration / Research (Brief Three)

Dan and myself decided to watch the documentary below which in short, explained the history of atlantis and then went on to film in places that it could possibly be, the main being in Greece.

It was a really interesting documentary, the main thing I took from this is the layout of the city - It is often depicted in circular rings.

OUGD603 Plato Cosmetics - Research: The Lost City of Atlantis - Collaboration / Research (Brief Three)

Atlantis, a likely mythical island nation mentioned in Plato’s dialogues “Timaeus” and “Critias,” has been an object of fascination among western philosophers and historians for nearly 2,400 years. Plato (c.424–328 B.C.) describes it as a powerful and advanced kingdom that sank, in a night and a day, into the ocean around 9,600 B.C. The ancient Greeks were divided as to whether Plato’s story was to be taken as history or mere metaphor. Since the 19th century there has been renewed interest in linking Plato’s Atlantis to historical locations, most commonly the Greek island of Santorini, which was destroyed by a volcanic eruption around 1,600 B.C.

Plato (through the character Critias in his dialogues) describes Atlantis as an island larger than Libya and Asia Minor put together, located in the Atlantic just beyond the Pillars of Hercules—generally assumed to mean the Strait of Gibraltar. Its culture was advanced and it had a constitution suspiciously similar to the one outlined in Plato’s “Republic.” It was protected by the god Poseidon, who made his son Atlas king and namesake of the island and the ocean that surrounded it. As the Atlanteans grew powerful, their ethics declined. Their armies eventually conquered Africa as far as Egypt and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia (Etruscan Italy) before being driven back by an Athenian-led alliance. Later, by way of divine punishment, the island was beset by earthquakes and floods, and sank into a muddy sea.

In 1679 the Swedish scientist Olaus Rudbeck published "Atland," a four-volume work in which he attempted to prove that Sweden was the original site of Atlantis and that all human languages were descended from Swedish. Though considered authoritative in his homeland, few outside of Sweden found Rudbeck’s arguments convincing.

Plato’s Critias says he heard the story of Atlantis from his grandfather, who had heard it from the Athenian statesman Solon (300 years before Plato’s time), who had learned it from an Egyptian priest, who said it had happened 9,000 years before that. Whether or not Plato believed his own story, his intent in telling it seems to have been to boost his ideas of an ideal society, using stories of ancient victory and calamity to call to mind more recent events such as the Trojan War or Athens’ disastrous invasion of Sicily in 413 B.C. The historicity of Plato’s tale was controversial in ancient times—his follower Crantor is said to have believed it, while Strabo (writing a few centuries later) records Aristotle’s joke about Plato’s ability to conjure nations out of thin air and then destroy them.

In the first centuries of the Christian era, Aristotle was taken at his word and Atlantis was little discussed. In 1627, the English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon published a utopian novel titled “The New Atlantis,” depicting, like Plato before him, a politically and scientifically advanced society on a previously unknown oceanic island. In 1882, former U.S. Congressman Ignatious L. Donnelly published “Atlantis: The Antediluvian World,” which touched off a frenzy of works attempting to locate and learn from a historical Atlantis. Donnelly hypothesized an advanced civilization whose immigrants had populated much of ancient Europe, Africa and the Americas, and whose heroes had inspired Greek, Hindu and Scandinavian mythology. Donnelley’s theories were popularized and elaborated by turn-of-the-20th-century theosophists and are often incorporated into contemporary New Age beliefs.

From time to time, archaeologists and historians locate evidence—a swampy, prehistoric city in coastal Spain; a suspicious undersea rock formation in the Bahamas—that might be a source of the Atlantis story. Of these, the site with the widest acceptance is the Greek island of Santorini (ancient Thera), a half-submerged caldera created by the massive second-millennium-B.C. volcanic eruption whose tsunami may have hastened the collapse of the Minoan civilization on Crete.

OUGD603 Helena Wrench Branding - Client Feedback - Live Brief (Brief Two)

Having spoke to Helena on the phone, she likes the rough idea that I described to her of the ladder a lot more than the idea of the table, as she said although she prefers doing interior design, a lot of her clients are mainly painting and decorating, so for this reason I will carry on with the ladder idea solely as it applies a lot more to her business.

She also discussed that she doesn't have a particular colour scheme in mind, so for this reason I will have creative control for this aspect of her branding.

OUGD603 Helena Wrench Branding - Logo Mock Ups - Live Brief (Brief Two)

I have drawn out some rough sketches of ideas that I had so that i wouldn't forget them, these can be seen below. From this, I can see that the ladder idea definitely has potential, however it needs a lot more work and digital rendering. Another idea that could be quite successful is the H and the W worked into a table design. This is also something that I'm definitely going to experiment with further. A lot of the other designs, however, I feel are quite obvious responses and wouldn't be very successful, original logos specific to Helena Wrench.

OUGD603 Helena Wrench Branding - Visual Inspiration - Live Brief (Brief Two)

Below are some examples found online for other interior designers across the world. The logo below is simplistic and uses circular shapes and linework to make up the icon. Personally, I don't think the typeface works very well with the logo design and it would look a lot more successful with a sans serif. Other than that, however, the actual icon is very successful. It shows the style of interior design that the designer would incorporate into their clients house.

The next logo design is very successful, however again doesn't go very well with the typeface. The typeface would work a lot better with the icon if it was thicker. The actual icon, however, is similar to the above in the sense that it gives an example of the type of interior design that would be purchased. It gives me the idea that the interior design would be very fancy and modern.

The next logo design is very simplistic. The typeface works for both the icon and logo, however the icon isn't very successful as it doesn't give an insight into what the interior designer creates, and it also doesn't scream interior design. It's a very corporate logo in my opinion.

This is the last logo design that I found. I don't think it's very well created and looks very off balance due to the use of sharp edges on the flower and then curves on the chair. The flower and the chair also don't sit very well together. The actual typeface used, however, is very successful and would work a lot better as logotype without the icon.