Learning Activity – Create a Logo – week 28 – Hedvig Lien's Reflective Journal

Brief:

Develop a name for a dog food product. Design a logo for this product, using full colour. The logo must contain a main visual and typography. (Use the “People Saving Pets” logo as a guide – this does not mean your design should be the same, it is simply an example.) Follow each of the fundamental steps outlined above, in that sequence and take note of what needs to be handed in as you progress through these steps:

Exploration – Use sketching techniques to draw thumbnails and hand in your thumbnails as scanned PDFs.
Focus – Highlight three of the thumbnail ideas that you consider the best options and state why. Hand in an A4 with visuals of the three chosen thumbnails; include reasons for choosing each of these three options.
Construction – Use sketching techniques and redraw ONE of your chosen concepts until you’ve reached a conclusion on a successful logo. Hand in your drawings as scanned PDFs.
Testing – Experiment more with your favourite options from Step 3 and ask the opinion of a few people. Hand in examples of the logos shown to people and write their feedback or opinion on each.
Reﬁnement – Choose your final design and execute it in Adobe Illustrator, along with the name of the product. Hand in your final logo as an A4 PDF.

Exploration:

Focus:

These are my favourites:

I like the excitement and action of the funny, running dog, though it looks a little like a calf.

I tried to work with negative space, and this may be a fun way to do it.

I like the simplicity of the dog as a name and visual style. I like the anticipation, the body language. He waits for food. I also like the idea that the logo is simplistic and in one colour, and then use colour for the packaging to show which type of dog food it is. It communicates quickly, and people will know which bag to grab from the shelf.

Construction & testing:

Feedback on designs:

I showed the abow sketch to Bergljot Støer, a fellow student. Here is her respons:

«The logo is simplistic and therefore very effective. It’s beautifully executed even in sketch-form and has a lot of potential to be very successful. The artist could potentially consider putting in a tagline or something to that effect to further emphasize what kind of product it is (i.e. «food for good dogs»), but I don’t think it’s needed and it’s just an idea. I look forward to seeing the digital rendering! 🙂«

My husband, Henning Bergersen, prefered the running, excited dog, but thought the sitting dog worked better with the footprints concept. He prefered the simple «theDog» with the mix of «the» and the image, instead of using the dog to represent the letter «D».

My friend and dog trainer Trude Løken prefered the dog being the «D», so these two did not agree. She liked the german sheppard + «og».

I presented these images to Åsne Ådland, a product designer:

She prefered the mix «the»+image of a dog, shown in the first image above. We talked about the footprints being shaped and coloured to suit the targeted age group. We also discussed the use of recycled brown paper for the bags. We both liked the idea of the footprints and logo having a silkscreen print effect.

Example, final design: