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Horatio street logo v3.pdfHoratio Street Logo
Horatio Street Logo
About the company: Horatio Street Wealth Management help wealthy clients manage their money. The name Horatio Street came from a street they lived on during the 1990’s.
About the design process: I showed one of my neighbors my portfolio, and they wanted me to design a logo for them. After discussing the business with them, it became evident that the logo should be somewhat conservative. The curve at the top of the logo is meant to subtly evoke the shape of a street sign, a request by the client. Green is associated with money, so it was an obvious inclusion in the design. The font for the first version of the logo was planned out using Illustrator’s base grid, well as a constructor grid, which was used to help build the letters using shape builder. The unusual positioning of the letters came about as a solution to two problems. The first was making sure that words conformed to the shape of the logo. The second was the difficulty of balancing the word mark. The solution that I came up with was a design risk for this kind of logo, but luckily for me the client liked it. After that we went through a few revisions. The font was changed, a tagline was added, and colors were adjusted.
What I learned: This logo taught me a lot about optical adjustments. I kept running into problems with hierarchy and balancing different elements. When I tried to balance the logo, it would mess up the hierarchy, and vice versa. I also ran into problems with the bone effect, so I had to repeatedly readjust to correct for that. Looking back, I probably would have taken a different approach, going for a more versatile design that was easier to balance.
Dob All Logo Variations .pdfDOB App Logos
DOB App Logos
About the company: Dob is an app being developed by an autistic programmer with the purpose of helping people with disabilities find jobs.
About the design process: I messaged them on Facebook after hearing from a mutual friend about the project. After introductions, we talked about the company mission, the name, the current logo, and how it all works together. After this discussion, we came to a few different conclusions about how the logo should be changed. The original logo lacked design intentionality. The original designer had not considered what the logo should be doing or how it was going to do that. If this is not done, then the end result is a logo that does not function well. The original Dob logo did not connect viewers to the brand. When someone saw the logo, they would not be able to tell what kind of company the logo was for, or what the company values. The colors used, while working together well from a color theory standpoint, were not applied in a harmonious fashion, starting and stopping in ways that made it difficult for the eye to navigate, and caused a lot of eye strain. Finally, the logo was not future proofed for different design applications that they would likely need in the future.
After explaining design intentionality to them, and what my design plan was, they were convinced to let me design a logo for them. At their request. I kept the color scheme and picked a similar font to the one that they had. For the image mark, I created a simplified face of a man wearing a hard hat. This came from a question I asked about the usage of yellow in the original logo. I told them that it reminded me on of a construction workers’ hard hat, and if that was intentional. They said that they wished that it was. I suggested that we should have a face as the logo. The idea was that this face would act as an every-man persona that users could latch onto. It also takes advantage of a couple of aspects of human psychology to draw people in. The first being pareidolia, which is the human tendency to see faces in patterns, and the second being the tendency for people to be drawn to faces. There were a few designs that we went through, some following this same idea, some following other trains of thought. In the end it came down to two designs, one of a guy in a suit (I thought that people might confuse the company for a construction company if we went with the hard hat.) and the design with the hard hat. After landing on a final design, I made a few different variations for different purposes, made some minor tweaks, and sent it off.
What I learned: This project taught me how to communicate with different kinds of clients. Autism can make socialization difficult for those affected by it. So, I took it upon myself to make sure I understood the client’s needs in order to best help them. I have some friends with autism, and they gave me some guidance on how to make sure that communication ran smoothly.
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