Brand and Logo
Introduction
For the website’s design, the logo is very important, with it people will keep the image in their head and associate it with a certain emotion and will help to design the website itself (such as the colors). The name SDG-market doesn’t seem appropriate in my opinion, mostly SDG. In fact, if we want to create a diverse community we should have a more appealing name. Even market at some extent makes the site looking too commercial, even if we have tokens and some kind of value attributed to each project. This document will talk about my research about logos creations and brand naming.
Finding a good naming
First, we are going to look for a name indeed if we think about it the name will give us a good start for a logo. We have many possibilities on how to find a good name, if we look at some brand names we could conclude that the brand names are:
- Using the founder or inventor’s name (Hewlett-Packard)
- Describing what you do (Southwest Airlines)
- Describing an experience or image (Sprint)
- Taking a word out of context (Apple)
- Making up a word (Google)
If I think about people everyday life, you’ll see they tend to remember unique names. A great name can create buzz, position you as a true leader and innovator, and reinforce your value proposition in a word or two. However, it can also neutralize or even negate the work you do to build a position in the market. So it’s important to think about it and make a good choice. In the financial point, by choosing a brand we also choose what URL we are going to use and thus depending on the money you put in the project certain name price are better than others. After finding some ideas and good URLs, we should ask people how do they feel about the name to be sure that it is appealing. If we follow the step of (1) and some brainstorming, we could come with good propositions.
The logo
“You want your logo to communicate your brand’s personality. And in order to do that, you first need to understand what your brand’s core personality is. Once you have a clear idea of what makes you unique and what your brand is all about, it will be much easier for you to make design choices that complement and complete that picture.” (2). This part is very important since the customer needs to have some leads on our brand by the name and mostly the logo. If we look at some brands we can see that they have a simple image or motif. Being simple is not that bad, in fact, we need an easy and effective way to make the audience remember our brand.
Logo design style
(2)Gives us 5 main logo design styles that exist:
- Classic: a classic logo will have one color with a certain color background and not too “bright”, this style tells people that you are reliable and down to earth.
- Retro or vintage: this type has been popular for a long time and evokes romantic feelings of nostalgia; it uses dark-toned colors.
- Modern and minimalist: a clean and minimalist style to communicate how fresh and modern they are by using geometrical images and whitespaces; that’s a very modern way to create a logo and thus showing you are up-to-date.
- Fun and quirky: this kind of logo are mostly targeting a young audience with some colorful and cute images.
- Handmade and handcrafted: this brand is individualistic and stands for handmade quality, it can be mixed easily with the other types mentioned before.
Of course, all of those types can be fused to give a unique logo.
Main types of logos
In addition to the overall style there are 7 main types of logos we can choose from when we are creating our logo:
Lettermark logos can be great to streamline the company logo, especially if the name is very long or hard to remember. Lots of businesses choose to go by their initials, just think of HP, CNN or H&M. These monograms can be great for minimalist logos, but they are not very good at expressing what the business is about.
Wordmarks are a very straightforward way of using the company name as a logo. It gives personality and recognition value, they are all about typography—just look at the wordmark logo for ONE.
Pictorial marks or logo symbols are what we think of when we hear the word “logo”. They are iconographic images that are easily recognizable and represent the brand with an image. We can choose something simplistic or more complex. Oftentimes these are paired with a wordmark. Instead of a recognizable symbol, abstract logo marks are geometric forms that don’t establish an immediate connection to an existing image but create something entirely new for the brand. An abstract logo mark will condense your business into a symbol that is truly unique to you.
Mascots are a fun way of giving your brand a personality. They are often colorful, cartoonish characters that represent your business in a family-friendly and approachable way.
A combination mark does exactly what it says on the tin: it combines a symbol with a word mark to create an easily recognizable logo. The brand name is either placed next to the symbol or is integrated into the graphic element. People will associate both elements with our brand, which allows us to use them both alone or together.
Similar to combination marks, emblems are also often a combination of word and pictorial elements. They usually consist of text integrated into a symbol or icon.
Color choice
As spoken into my “aspects of a website”, colors are very important to a vehicle a certain emotion and I already described some colors. To be sure to have matching colors there are 3 different way to associate colors:
- Using complementary colors (2 opposite colors)
- Using analog colors (3 side-by-side colors)
- Using triadic colors (3 equally spaced around the color-circle, triangle-like)
Typography
There are 4 types of fonts that we can use:
Serif is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol, it gives an old-fashioned and elegant look for a brand i.e Freight Text, Caslon, Garamond, and Stanley.
Sans serif is the opposite of serif (so no little line), this font is often used in modern and sleeker looks i.e Helvetica, Avant Garde, Arial, and Geneva.
Script is a font looking like handwriting and gives a very unique look i.e Blackletter, Calligraphic, Casual and Celtic.
Display is a typeface that is intended for use at large sizes for headings, rather than for extended passages of body text, this type gives a more funky look. i. Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Decorative and Graffiti.
Animals
Some brands have an animal as their logo. So, like colors, animals have a signification and send a different feeling to the user. Let’s mention some of the most common:
A cat symbol means freedom, spiritual power, tenderness, hedonism, mystery, (and either good or bad luck in Japan)
A Bear symbol means strength, courage, and tenacity and is the animal that represents the sellers in the market, so it is used along with the bull in several trading and stocks related projects
A Bull means strength, courage, tenacity and is the animal that represents the buyers in the market, so it is used a lot in stocks and trading-related projects
A Fox symbol means intelligence and slyness.
An Elephant symbol means power, dignity, intelligence, and peace.
A Dolphin symbol means salvation, transformation, and love.
A Horse Symbol means velocity, vitality, and beauty.
An Ant means hard effort, while a group of ants can portray effective teamwork.
Dogs portray loyalty and unconditional love.
Other animals can be found on the website (4) and (5).
Adinkra symbols
Not very used, those symbols have a meaning (see (6)). The advantages are: they don’t have any copyright, they are simple and they are not used that much so it could be a good way to be original.
Avoiding generic logos
To better apprehend the logo creation we can look at existing logos and we can see that there are many logos nearly identic. We would want to avoid having an unoriginal design. The article of (3) really describes well all the used icons and what methods we can use to find an original idea.
My ideas
Branding
In my opinion, to include most of our community, we need something different from SDG. In fact, if we talk about SDGs some people will find it too vague or not connected with their objective. Indeed we will first target programmers and developers. The next part “market” should stay (or we could find a synonym for it if it feels odd) since the point is to evaluate projects, being able to trade the generated tokens between users and having a financial help (with philanthropy or other kinds of investors). So developers.market seems to be a more appropriate name than SDG market. If we look trough URLs prices we can conclude that it’s not so expensive($80.44)(7).
Logo
In this part, I will propose some logo ideas and concepts. These ideas could work for both my proposition and the current name, SDG market. I want to create a circle icon seeing that the names are long so we will put them around the logo. In the center I see many possibilities; Nyomi showed me the African symbols and “ANANSE NTONTAN” took our attention, indeed this symbol represents “‘spider’s web’, symbol of wisdom, creativity and the complexities of life” (7) which is really fitting looking at the purpose of our website. The ant is also very fitting (see animals). I would prefer the ant because people can recognize it easier than the spider’s web but both must be considered. The color scheme will be one that I proposed in the design of a website, the one with dark blue, teal, light pink and orange. I feel like that we should use only two fo them, teal and orange or dark blue and orange. I put orange since having a dark-toned color and a more flashy one gives a better look and an easier way to memorize the logo. [add some logo idea]
Documentation
(1) https://www.columnfivemedia.com/how-to-choose-a-brand-name
(2) https://en.99designs.ch/blog/logo-branding/how-to-design-logo/
(3) https://en.99designs.ch/blog/tips/generic-logos/
(4) http://www.spiritanimal.info/animal-meanings/
(5) https://www.spirit-animals.com/
(6) http://www.adinkra.org/htmls/adinkra/anan.htm
(7) https://www.name.com/domain/search/developers.market#notify