studio practice : Studio Brief 1 - Logo Type

Last week I was set a brief to pick a international company which was also in leeds, and rebrand there logo design. We had to choose a company depending on if with thought there current logo was not suitable for their company and change it to what we thought would be suitable.

I started off my researching a little bit into T.G.I Fridays as a company and began jotting notes down that may help me into my experiments that I've done.

During my research I found an image of the first ever T.G.I Fridays which was built in New York city. What I found interesting was that the original building was blue and in no logo design in this century have they incorporated the colour blue which I found odd, considering it's an an American dinner. I did notice however that they used the colours red and blue which have been carried out throughout the time of people re-branding the logo, so it does keep with some tradition.

The brand which I choose to re-brand was T.G.I Fridays. I choose T.G.I as my re-brand project as, I really want to change the target audience that it attracts at the moment which is families. I would like to change the target audience to teenagers and above from fifteen upwards, the reason why is because that teenagers these days don't really have any chilled and laid back places where they can sit back and have a drink and a bite to eat.

There current logo which I want to change works with the current target audience being families and children, as i think that the type which has been used is quite playful, yet it is old fashioned from my point of view. From someone my ages eye, currently it's not somewhere I would go. I find the logo tacky and the type used very immature so immediately it limits down types of people that will go there for food and drink.

During my research I found that T.G.I Fridays has recently been rebranded, but I choose to stick with T.G.I for my re-brand as I didn't find the re-brand particularly pleasing. The reason why I do not like the new re-brand as i think that they, type is to chunky, It doesn't really say america, and I think overall it's just boring to look at and I wouldn't personally walk past and find the logo intriguing enough to want to go into the restaurant.

During my research into T.G.I Fridays, I did some research into the interior of the restaurant and found that there was posters, album covers, T-shirts, Guitars. I feel it's almost like it was trying to copy the Hard Rock Cafe interior.

After researching, past logos, interior I began to research american dinners logos on design website such as Behance i did this hoping that it would give me some more inspiration in what i should start experimenting with, here are some examples of the work which I thought looked good and communicate:

The reason why I think that this communicates well is because how simplistic the design is, and how they've used the colours subtly to insinuate america and haven't complicated the design to make it luck tacky.

This is another lovely design which I found, this particular design I like the idea of the text being overlaid and how they colours are overlapped it adds texture, and the used of the mono print and colours make it look modern and sophisticated.

This is another design which I'm not a fan of how it looks and I think it could be better, but the idea of how the type is stacked on top of each other which reminds us of a burger and how it's in a n oval shape and looks like a bun as well because it's yellow.

From the research which I did I then began to sketch out some ideas trying to take in all the information which I found out over the past couple days and get it on paper. Here are some of the sketches which I have created.

From my sketches I then began to analyse which typeface would be best for the type of logo I was creating, which is retro and modern, I decided that I would use the font Bebas Neue. The reason I choose this font is because I found it had a retro feel to it already and it also looked modern due the shape of the letters.

I felt that the other typefaces that I looked at were rather to thin or would look slightly old fashioned when I'm trying to make my re-brand modern.

From Finding the typeface which I would like to use I then started doing some digital experimentation.

In this piece of experimentation i tried to make my type which i was experimenting with look 3D, so I added another layer of text to try make it seem 3D but I found that it didn't work particularly well because I hadn't used a strong enough colour so you could see the text in the background. In most of my type you will see the colour red, that's because red is a significant colour on the American flag and it's also a bold colour and stands out to a customer.

This is another idea I came up with, I changed the layout so that legibility would not be an issue when it is shrunk down to a smaller size and also because I think that it looked sophisticated and simple. I then decided I wanted to add all the colours of the American flag so i brought in red and blue thick lines to show that, I also thought that it would work well as the original company used blue on there building so it also brings back some tradition. Although I do like the idea of this design I do not think it is suitable for my brand as I feel due to the colour and usage of the stripes it looks like a buckers or barbers.

This time I changed the colour of the stripes which were going round in the rectangle, I wanted the colour to look more friendly and visually attractive, but i found when you look at it that it doesn't say much about America and the baby blue colour doesn't go nicely against the vibrant red.

Although I wasn't satisfied by the previous logo designs I came up with, I thought that I would give another go on making the type 3D, I think the use of the 3D works well on this logo design as it's not to much. I used a darker red in the background as i thought it might give a better 3D impact. I did only stick to one colour scheme in this logo design as I really liked how it looked. Although I liked how it looked and how smart I thought it looked, again it didn't communicate much about America and to me personally looked like a clothing label.

From learning from my mistakes which I made in my previous experiments, I thankfully had a brain storm whilst trying to think of ideas. I started to sketch these ideas and create a mockup of the idea which i had in my head.

The idea behind this logo design that i thought of, I wanted to make a logo that looked like the american flag in the most subtle way and also show the idea of food whilst still looking modern and attractive. Following from these sketch's and mockup design I stared to digitally experiment with them properly.

The idea behind this design was to stack things on top of each other to make it look like a burger in a stubble way and make the american flag stand out, by using stars at the side of the text, the use of the red bars which I have created not only link to the previous traditional colours of my brand but could also relate to the bar which Is in T.G.I Fridays. I really liked this idea that I came up with as it had quite a lot of meaning behind it but I found the colours to be to bright and immature, and as i said previously i wanted to work on ways in which would make my logo more mature.

So I started to bring the colour black into my logo idea as when I think of maturity I think of darker colours. Also in some logos it can make your brand look professional, as for my logo design I do not think that it does this. I think that it makes my brand look tacky. I did try to invert the colour of the text to make it look more appealing and also change the colour of the stars but it still wasn't going to look how I wanted it to.

Learning from my past experimentation I began to start to come up with another idea which was to make my logo look more like a burger, doing this i created a oval shape which I then coloured brown to look like a burger. I like the idea originally until i realised how chunky and thick that it actually looked and how shrinking down to a smaller size that my logo will look like a big oval brown shape. So I then messed around with the use of colour trying to change to colour to see if the legibility would be better.

I changed the colour of the burger into a mustard colour, at the time I was trying to think about the colour of a Macdonadl's burger and at the time it seemed like a good idea but looking back at it now it was a bad choice. I still think that when it is shrunk down that the legibility wouldn't be good and the mustard colour would be overpowering.

In this design Below I tried to stick with the basic shape of the flag again, but this time I added quite a few stars. I didn't like this idea once I had done it as I felt that it looked tacky and that when it will be shrunk down the strars would not be legible anymore.

This idea above shows an american flag, I thought it would be interesting to make it look really obvious that I wanted people to see it was an American restaurant and actually quite like the design, but as a logo I think it's to big and chunky and would work better on a wall as a big statement piece.

This image below is when I was trying to go back to my similar ideas that I previously had and try to make them work, for this idea below I kept the idea of the 3D text as I thought it worked well and then added the colour blue into it. Once adding the blue to make it look more American I decided that it didn't work.

This logo above which i designed I darkened the colours to give it more formality and maturity and made the bars thinner as I thought they looked to thick. I then started playing round again with Typefaces as I was sure if some of the Typefaces that i previously research now thinking about it would be better. In result to this development I found that I didm't like the type in this logo and started developing again with my original type i decided on.

Focusing on the the type I originally choose in these two logos below I experimented with the thickness of the type and thinness to see which I thought looked best. In resupply to this I found that the thicker typeface was just to thick, but the thinner typeface was just right. I then also decided to play around with the thickness of the red bars on the logo designs that I created as i felt the rectangles were to chunky, I think the thinner rectangles look better as they look more professional.

Below is the design's of the four logos which I liked the most. But the one which I have chosen for my final piece is the logo at the bottom right of the page. The reason for choosing this as my final logo as I think it communicates best as; It shows the American flag, It uses the American Flag colours, how it is stacked up shows the idea of a burger which is American food, the bars can stand for the bar within the restaurant, the type is modern, simple and retro. The use of the darker colours also make it look more mature and the legibility works well when it's shrunk down to a smaller size. Overall I am happy with my final outcome and think that it fits the brand I have chosen well and the target audience.