InitialResearch

For me the ‘Design Investigation’ Brief is very much a continuation of ‘Your Title Here’ in the sense that I essentially get to do what I want in the field I am interested in. Initially I decided to look at the fields of Advertising, Branding and Gaming, then deciding on the field I would like to explore. To expand my knowledge on each field I went on to not only look briefly at each spectrum broadly but too research studios involved in these fields, to give me a better idea of where I might want to be in the future.

I looked at four studios which did not really focus on one specific area of design, rather encapsulate the fields I am interested in, the studios being; Delete. , Firedog, 400 and Pentagram. The likes of Pentagram, work within a huge number of design sectors, such as; architecture, print, editorial, branding, advertising etc. which would allow me to develop my skills in a range of ways as well as being renowned as one of the best design studios in the world. 400 on the other hand are very much a studio which represent my sort of style, being minimalist and colour focused in their approach. Having a tight nit team, working on branding / advertising projects in sport, film etc. sectors that interest me.

Firedog are like a mini Pentagram, with potential to be bigger. As a studio their extremely creative, often focusing on collaboration within their projects, which allows them to showcase their range of mediums and abilities. Delete. caught my eye due to their medium versatility, and although they do focus on Branding, their work is of an extremely high quality and they vary stylistically from piece to piece, definetly limiting the boredom.

Following my look at the design studios, I had decided to further look at Branding, due to the fact its on of a few fields in which you are able to employ a huge array of design skills and variants. I decided to employ the same approach when having my initial look at the field of Branding, by looking at a number of studios; Design Bridge, Elmwood and JKR. I looked at these three studios specifically due to their stylistic approach to Branding, due to the fact that they do their work using a number of mediums and the fact that they all are very thorough when producing their projects.

From there it was a matter of coming up with a question, which I could explore within Branding...

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InitialIdea

Why Branding? Well I see Branding as an area of the industry that is constantly in need, an area which is constantly redesigned and needs designers to keep it relevant. Its something I take a shine too because of its long development process and that creating a brand is not just creating a ‘logo’ but creating / showcasing the brands entire identity.

The ‘Design Invesitgation’ essentially required me to think of something too investigate, explore within my chosen field, something I was interested in, but didnt necessarily know much about. I knew straight away their was no point trying to look at Branding as a whole, since it would be way too broad, and any information I would present, is likely to be known by my audience. The specific area I wanted to look at was brand trademarks and identities, due to the fact that this is what the public is normally first made aware of, which it comes to the brand. Specifically I was interested in brand strength, also known to me as brand recognition. What makes a brand recognisable? How far can a brand be stripped back before it becomes unrecognisable? Are brands becoming over designed?

The next question is to figure out how to actually test a brands recognition and how to actually develop a visual test for this. Knowing I already wanted to look at brand identities, I thought what better way too test a brand’s recognisability than by altering their ident in some sort of way. Stripping back a brand’s ident too its bare basics and then finding out if people can still recognise it would be the best and most logical option. This could also be done with something like packaging, but then looking at bringing back the brands identity through the packaging to its simplest form, and seeing what works best. All of the designs and information gathered would then be displayed in some form of book or website, somewhere which it can be read, but also be branded, to give everything a sense of continuation.

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InterviewsResearch &

Having come up with the basic structure of my idea for this brief, it was time to get in contact with designers within the industry, that would expand my knowledge on the subject.

The two designers I managed to grab hold of are Alex Martineau (a US born designer, currently living in Denver) and Liviu Avasiloiei (24 year old designer focused on branding, living in Baltimore, USA). I focused a number of questions on the process going on behind developing a branding project; to give me a better understanding of everything that goes on behind the scenes, when branding an entire company. Their were also questions that looked at the inspiration behind a select logo’s designed, how important they felt colour was in ident design (they both agreed it was very much dependant on the project) and how their backgrounds inspired their art direction. I did though ask a number of questions which would help me with the development of my own ‘ident designs’, such as what they beleive works better (complex or minimalist design), what makes an ident recognisable and what defines a strong logo.

From there I went on too look at some specific branding inspiration, by looking at some pieces of branding that I saw as extremely well done. My main inspiration being the ‘City of Melbourne’ branding done by Jason Little. I absolutely love the design process behind this piece of branding, due to the fact that the chosen logo is showcased in a huge number of different styles as well as being based on the simplicity of a few geometric shapes, showing that something simple can take a number of shapes.

I also took a huge amount of inspiration from Minimalist and Swiss design for obvious reasons. Due to the fact that the designs I will be creating are going to essentially be minimalist, it would definetly be a good idea too look at some designs in that field. Minimalist designers tend to only want to display the essential visuals, with the most limited colour palettes to create clear and visually pleasing outcomes; in many ways what I am trying to achieve. White space is something that was put to the forefront of design by Swiss design - something that is very important when it comes to ident design. Correctly framing an image / colour etc. will make it stand out that much more, making it stick in memory that much easier.

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EarlyDevelopment

Having created the basic designs for my ident pieces, I decided to look at more in depth research towards the subject I am looking at. First of all I wanted to find out how we as people actually go about recognising visuals, which led me through a fair chunk of scientific research. It turns out we recognise imagery through the temporal lobe, forming a range of shapes and colours, then piece them together to create an image (the more we see this image, the quicker we form it, among other things). Knowing the the basics behind the idea of recognition, I wanted to see what sort of techniques designers use to make brand’s stand out. Pattern and colour tend to be the two main techniques used to increase recognition, with the right colour mixture a image becomes more punchy, while repetition throughout not only an ident but a brand’s entire range increases its chance of grabbing a wider audience.

With a chunk of research out of the way I was ready to begin designing, starting off with the brand idents. To start off I decided to collect a selection of logo’s (around the 30mark) used by a wide variety of brands. I wanted the brands too be incredibly varied, with some being known world wide, some only being seen in the UK while others only Outside, some being design orientated and some not.

Having the logo’s ready it was a matter of sketching out some ideas, limiting certain shapes and colours to create very basic forms of the already existing idents. The quick sketches I created were very much meant to be guidelines, looking at how I can focus the entire ident too a few colours and shapes. From the sketches it was a matter of bringing them them into the digital medium, allowing me to see what works in terms of structure, colours and layout. Throughout this process I noticed what worked in terms of complexity (such as the Jack Daniels logo being too complex and too obvious) while trying to simplify something like the ‘Monster’ would not work due to the minimalist approach the original logo already has.

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Furtherdevelopment

As well as doing the huge selection of idents, I wanted to contextualise all of this information by doing a short introduction to branding and what it is. I felt using the interview with Alex Martineau as a base, and then performing some sort of analysis of one of his pieces as an introduction to branding, supported by some sort of literature.

Having designed the almost final iterations of my designs, it was time to get started on the thing which would house them. Having decided on a report to hold my designs and information, I started designing workable, minimalist layouts, that would in most parts, only hold designs and data on the page, to really continue that stripped back feel. Another thing I wanted to make sure was that the sense of ‘branding’ and ‘continuity’ was never lost, therefore certain brand marks (logo etc.) and layout trends were constantly continued to give the report a flow and a constant style.

Having done research towards image recognition and certain design trends, as well as having done all the initial design sketches towards my designs, it was time to begin the final designs.

With all of the original logo’s collected I tried to figure out the quickest and most original ways to develop my own versions of the idents. For each one I created a colour palette to give me a reference, and went about initially deleting anything I felt was unecessary (colour / shape etc). I decided too split the 30 idents I was to do in around the middle in terms of the 2 styles I would be designing them in (original look and abstract). I wanted to see how far I could abstract an ident, and if the public would still recognise it and would it make a difference against the less abstracted idents. For each abstract design, I tried to strip down the logo towards a geometric shape and only a few colours from its original colour pallete, while with the other logo’s I simply removed what I thought was over designed (such as the name) and kept only a few distinct shapes from the original.

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Data Collectionvisualisation &

With all my data collected and organised, the next question was how to display it? Their are a number of ways to visualise data; through text, typical charts, collated imagery or through the method I chose being infographics. Having prior knowledge with infographics, I straight away attempted to sketch out a few potential design styles for the infographics that would work with the most common amout of information I would be displaying (2pieces). I focused my attention towards pie charts and graphical displays, rather than typical bar charts or relatable imagery, since I felt the clear cut and simple theory behind both goes with what I was trying to achieve. One of my main inspirations for this was ‘Feltron’ due to how he managed to display a mass of information, with constant variants, never really reusing the same design, or alterting it in such a way so it didnt look the same. As with everything I was not worried about colour schemes or anything yet, since thats something I would be deciding on, once everything was organised and arranged, so visually everything pieced together.

Having designed all the pieces of the design jigsaw, it was a matter of collecting the all important data, that would really give the context to my experiments. First it was the turn of the ident designs, whom I was to show to 20 different people, of different backgrounds and ages. Each image was shown once, and the first answer was taken, the images were shown in the same order to everyone and absolutely no hints were given and no context was given to the imagery (besides stating that all of them are brands). I did try and help bed everyone in to the process by starting the images of with what I saw as a fairly obvious design (coca cola) to make the process easier and more comfortable. The data for the packaging was collected in a similar manner, but was shown to proffesionals, whom were simply asked of their opinion (original or my version).

Once all of the data was collated, from the people questioned, it had to be organised, split up and put in tables to be easier to digest and read. Having done that, then it was a matter of categorising the idents into different variables etc, which would give me a better understanding of the answers, as well as contextualising every interviewees answers.

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The Final

I feel I have researched a huge amount on the subject of branding, starting out from the broadest perspective, to its nooks and crannies. I also feel having the oppertunity to look at some specific literature to do with the subject, and being able to reach out and gain contact with industry experts has really developed my knowledge and design skills in this area. Things such as knowing how we recognise visuals, and that the way you brand is very much relevant to the sector is in, is something I would of never known.

I do feel had I had more time and the oppertunity to contact more designers, I could have developed my experiment towards brand recognition a lot more. I mainly focused on the recogniton towards brand idents, but could quite easily broaden this out towards promotional items, packaging etc. Also their is also the possibility to look at rebranding, the whole infastructure behind branding etc.

Overall though I feel what I wanted to achieve has been. I widened my understanding of branding, and went on to find out how strong brand recognition really is.

With almost everything designed I decided to first beging laying everything out, within the report. Initially doing this on paper, just simply sectioning everything off from itself and then through indesign.Once everything was in its own little section, all the type that was needed to fill the void was put in place, followed by some minimal items (page numbers etc). Lastly the last few pieces of infographics were added, which got the design part of the report out of the way, in the main anyway.

Then it was time to design the front and back covers, which would stylistically fit in with the rest of the report as well as hint at whats inside. The inspiration came from the rainbown of colours in the report and the one colour that was seen constantly throughout. This was done by a repetitive pattern of swatches, which displays some of the colours used throughtout the report and really bring everything full circle. The same really was done throughout the stylystic theme of the report, keeping one colour constant, while adjusting other colours depended on whats located on the page.

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