Archive for October, 2006
CGI Interactive Logo Design Thursday, October 26th, 2006 by Mike
Last year, after Paul Bradley came across Ian Landsman’s Creating a Business Logo article, he asked if we could design a new logo for his company, cgi Interactive. One of my passions as design director at MakaluMedia is logo design and corporate identity, so I was excited to take on the project.
Paul’s firm. cgi Interactive, is a software development company based in the North West of England, who develop custom web based applications for businesses. The CGI moniker had its touch-point in the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programming done for clients in the early days of the Internet.
Paul wanted to maintain a connection to the past by keeping the CGI name, while coming up with a strong, clean logo to represent his company, on both the web and with other print materials (letterhead, envelopes and business cards).
Questions & Research
I started as I always do: asking questions of Paul about his company, goals, taste and thinking and doing my own gathering of information about the company. While it might seem trivial, the information gathering phase is critical — these are the words I ponder, as I prepare to sketch logo concepts that capture the company in a simple, iconic form.
From my initial research, it seemed the logomark should be simple and clean, yet still have a bit of a human touch, as Paul mentioned a history of “bespoke” or custom software development.
Sketching Ideas
As I sketched ideas out, I began focusing on a mark made of the letters C, G and I — using them to form a compact object.
Rounded letter-forms turned into squared letter-forms. I liked the idea of the C wrapping itself around the I to form a “G” at the intersection. To reinforce the “I” character, I used a lower cased variation to take advantage of the dot.
Black & White Explorations
We both liked this direction, so my next step was to jump into Adobe Illustrator and create the letters in black and white vector form, where I could explore the relationships of the C, G and i elements:
Notice how the horizontal stroke of the “i” character extends into the counter of the capital C character, to form a G. Then, the dot of the i character fills out the upper right corner of the mark. I like creating logos in black and white first — to assure they work well in their simplest form.
The mark also created an unintentional, yet nice side effect — notice the appearance of of a person on the right, extending an arm into the C, with the dot of the “i” acting as the head? What a nice coincidence!
Color Explorations
Next up was the color phase, which was quite straightforward, as Paul knew he wanted cool blues and greens used. I explored some complimentary warm colors with the mark, but we kept coming back to a combination of dark sea green and a sky blue to capture a solid, professional feel:
Notice also the font used is a Myriad/Gill Sans blend with a little custom tweaking done on the letters. The “cgi” text was kept in the sky blue, and “Interactive” stayed in the dark sea green, corresponding to the colors chosen for the mark.
Paul was very pleased with the final logo design. He felt it captured the professional look he wanted to portray, yet still maintained a human touch, to represent the custom, collaborative projects cgi Interactive does. I had fun working on the logo design, facing the challenge and seeing a unique mark emerge from the letters themselves.
Since designing Paul’s logo in 2005, we’ve had many interesting and challenging logo projects come from new and existing clients, keeping me happily busy doing what I love — logo design.
If you like this approach to logo design, and need logo or corporate identity design work, just drop me a line and let’s talk!
Recommended Design Resources Saturday, October 7th, 2006 by Mike
Our crew has been very busy this year, helping customers with the corporate identities, application icons, websites, and back-end systems — which is why it’s been quiet here at the Summit blog. In an effort to get back into blogging, I’ve decided to share links to design resources we use in the development of our work here at MakaluMedia.
MyFonts: WhatTheFont?
This very slick online tool lets you upload an image of your font in question and get details on what font it might be. Alex shared this one with me and I was impressed with how accurate it was!
Fontshop Type Navigator
An online tool that can help you visually identify fonts you are clueless about through process of elimination. Use the selections on the left side to narrow down your font until you find just what you’re looking for.
LinoType Font Explorer X
This free tool from LinoType provides very nice font management features for Mac OS X which supplement Apple’s stock Font Book application. You can also buy fonts directly from LinoType from Font Explorer X, making it the iTunes for fonts.
LogoPond
This is an excellent site with cataloged identities you can search by various features, including by color or by rating. This is a nice place to go for inspiration. I really need to submit some of our logos here!
PrintingForLess.com
This printer in Livingston, Montana (Big Sky Country) has very smart people, great pricing and does really nice 4 color print work. We’ve seen good stuff come from PFL for several clients and like their approach to business. Robert Scoble did a video walkthrough of their plant which is well worth watching.
Apple Developer Connection: Icon Genres and Families
This simple document has all sorts of good stuff for the Mac OS X icon designer, including appearance, lighting, design and technical details to help you get your icons spot on.
Design Observer
An excellent resource for the latest in design thought and commentary by founding writers Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand, Rick Poynor and many more contributing writers to boot. More than just pretty pictures, Design Observer always gives me something to think about.
I hope these links provide inspiration in your work or your thinking. If you have links to share with our team, please do! We always love finding new, useful resources.