AAD Assignment 3, Post 2-Logo & Identity Guide

27/11

Over the weekend I worked on the logo and variations.  I settled on a monogram (DSD) and a secondary or alternative one of a sheep formed from the DSD.  Here's my ideation from that weekend, it also includes some work on the concept that Ian gave me of tilting the Ds (this came in the next week).

I also researched the typefaces.  I stuck with the two Royal Mail fonts (Banks & Miles Doubleline and Chevin), and selected ITC Kabel Book as body text.  Work was also done on the colour blindness considerations of my pictures.

I also built the grid during this time. I wanted blocks of text and a asymmetric layout.  There are three  different column widths, and four large horizontal blocks.  This resulted in some discussion later, especially about my intolerance with people who will not read the guide.

5 hours

Weekend of 29 Nov-1 Dec

I wrote up a lot of the guide.  I added Tahoma as the accessible font for products.  I researched the colour blindness more and selected my final hues.  I looked at the contrast and found yellow causes problems. I finally found an orange that gives AA.

At the end of this I had some formatting and values to add during the next class.

8 hours

2/4 Dec

Worked on the final formatting.  Discussed the sideways horns with Ian, decided to the stick to vertical. Wrote up my values, finalized the colour coding for the colour blind colours.  None of the vision checking sites actually give you the colour codes so this was bit of a nause.

6 hours

6/7 Dec

Final checks, made the power point, finished up this blog.

Despite early misgivings, I concluded that this was a worthwhile exercise.  In fact two out of the three previous branding exercises were useful, and allowed me to the do a better job this time.  They also helped in the actual logo design process, I felt that part was made easier by previous experience.  Practice does make perfect I guess.  I'm glad I chose my grand parents and Orkney as the inspiration.  It makes it more likely that I will keep up with brand as I've created a personal connection.  I hope this personal connection resonates with any potential customers should I decide to make this a commercial enterprise.  Barring commercialization of this, it will still be a nostalgic and happy little artifact and memento.  As far as skills gained, it was mostly in using Illustrator. Manipulating the logo meant a lot of stroke and pathfinder use, something I had avoided in the past- for some reason, it's really useful!

4 hours