- Hey folks, a number of you, have asked
me to create a video that shows me
going through the logo design process.
What I've done is I've gone back through
my logo files and I've chosen a project
which I think you'll find interesting.
The client approached me with an existing
logo design, which they
felt wasn't working
for their brand and tasked me with the job
of creating something
new that would better
reflect their business and
the product that they were selling.
The product in question
were paintings and limited-edition prints.
So, let's get in and
I'll show you what I did.
Okay folks, so here we
are, here is the logo that
I was asked to refresh
and not so much a rebrand.
The business name is staying the same,
but the client had an issue that the
logo wasn't really working for them.
So I think we can all probably agree
that looking at this logo, it's
quite hard to make out what it says.
Now, it says Simply
Jack Vettriano and it's
just very, very condensed,
far too condensed
for my liking and at the
edge or the end of the
word, the N, I and
the O are really really
kind of it's quite complicated,
it just doesn't work.
It's too hard at a glance.
You know, you want to be
able to read a company's
name at a glance quickly, and you can't do
that with this, and so the client asked me
to come up with another logo that they
could use mainly on their website.
They sell Jack Vettriano limited-edition
prints and they wanted something for that.
So having a quick look in
case you don't know, Jack Vettriano
is a Scottish painter and
here's an example of some of his work and
as you can see, it's got quite a sort of a
nineteen twenties,
thirties sort of forties.
You know it's got that vintage look to the
paintings and, based on that, I thought
would be quite nice to use a font which
kind of harked back to that sort of era.
So I had to look around
and checked out some
fonts that were sort of Art Deco in look.
I aimed just to see how how they were and
found quite a few kind of narrowed it down
to two four, which I quite liked.
I like the circular O rather than the
elongated stretched one.
This third one here
wasn't a big fan of the O and the
N there, it stands out too much.
I wasn't a big fan of that, and so what I
did was, I kind of narrowed it down
to these two fonts here and eventually
decided to go with this second one.
I just liked the balance of the weight.
I felt that the tracking between
the letters was much better.
If you look at this one
above the spacing between
the E and the T's and the
P and the L, the C and E
it just wasn't quite right.
Now I could go in and
I could adjust the tracking--
Sorry, adjust the kerning
between those letters, and to show you
what I mean by that is,
I can, if i zoom in and
if you look at the E here,
what I can do is I can
highlight that and I can
decrease the kerning.
So you'll see that moving
in and out and so what
I've been looking at, I've
been looking at something
like minus 75 to bring
that T closer across
next to that, and the same here
with the the L and the Y.
I'd want to bring that closer.
Maybe minus 25 on there
just so that it kind of
reads a bit better and
again, you've got the
same sort of issue with
the S and the I there.
take that to sort of
25, and so what you're
doing there is you're
kind of, you're optically
adjusting the kerning, the spaces between
letters so that it looks more natural to
the eye when you're reading it.
But you know, I didn't
want to really go in and
I've done it there to
show you how it works.
But I just felt that this second font
here, which is called Copacetic just kind
of worked for me, and so I decided
this is the font I was going to go with.
Now we could have just stuck
with that and gone with
a work mark and just taking
the font as it is typed out.
I'm not a big fan of doing that.
I do like to add something else in and
whether it would be a symbol or a shape
or do something with the letters just
to give it a bit more of uniqueness.
Now, having looked at Jack Vettriano's
paintings and done a
bit of research on him.
It turns out that this painting called the
Singing Butler is one of his best selling
prints and it's one of his most well known
prints, the Singing Butler, and it just--
I love it as well.
I think it's a really great painting.
It'S just got a lot of kind of movement
to it and the sort of the the maid
struggling with the umbrella and it
looks like it's a quite a blustery day.
The wind's blowing and you've got the the
Butler here with his
umbrella as well, and I
had a look through and
there there are a few
paintings actually which have umbrellas in
them and with this one
being sort of the most
famous one, I thought
it'd be quite nice to
bring that umbrella into the mix,
and so what I did was
I started to look ideas
of bringing the umbrella
in and first of all, I
thought top down to replace the O with the
umbrella and then maybe moving it around,
maybe having that as a leaving shape, but
I didn't like this shape, it was too
pointed and I wasn't a big fan of that,
and so what I did was I decided to look
at it side on as it is in the painting.
I started to look at
the shape of it and you
know, as I was doing, I realised that the
handle could potentially be a J, and so I
kind of worked on that and took the J from
the font and kind of
polished it at the bottom.
It's a bit short, but I knew that I could
play around with that J and make it maybe
stretch it a little bit
and to make it work more
as a handle, and so I did was I put the--
Inserted that N to the word mark
and just liked that idea
from this, just as soon as I did it, I
thought that's got something about it.
It brings in the story of this Singing
Butler painting, which most people know
him for, and it just adds a little bit of
visual interest to the whole thing, and
what I wanted to do was the original logo
if you remember was in
a box, and I wanted to
try out and see how it
would look if I also put
a border around this
one just to contain it,
because it's on the
website, I just thought
it'd be quite nice to
have it in his own sort
of container box, and so
tried that a few things
and eventually what my way to this version
where the box actually,
where the umbrella and
the letter J or the
handle sort of intersects
the lines and so the
lines break, and it just,
it draws your attention a bit more to
the umbrella there and then the name
contained inside that
box, and I was really
happy with that and
that's pretty much where I
finished up with the logo for the client.
Presented it to the client and yeah.
They were over the moon with it
and they thought it was great.
Obviously what you have
to do is you have to
check that the logo will work on a dark
background, so I did a secondary option in
white and with some tints of black here.
Just as the light grey and so you've still
got that an almost 3D element to the
umbrella there and that worked great.
Now, another thing that
you have to bear in mind
is that this is quite a wide logo.
A long horizontal logo and when it
comes to social media,
you're going to want
something which fits into sort of a square
or a circle for your profile images.
So one of the last things that I did is I
just kind of worked up a couple of
shapes for social media which just
shortened it down to SJV, and so that the
client could use that
on things like Facebook
and Twitter and final
here just to show you
the original, now it's
kind of because that's
zoomed in a little bit, I'll zoom, so the
original and then the
replacement one from me.
So I hope you guys think that the the
new one is better and maybe fits
the clients business a bit better,
reflects on the artist,
whereas the the one
above was difficult to
read and didn't really
have much of a link to the artist
at all, but the the new
one I think does, and
I think it fulfilled that, so this
is sort of a logo refresh project.
There wasn't a huge amount of research
or a huge amount of sketching, which I
would normally do for a brand identity
project which is starting from scratch.
This was a quicker project and one which
didn't really require
the in-depth amount of
detail and research that
I would normally do.
But I still think I did look into
the artist and I looked at other sort of
gallery sites and did
do some due diligence
and looked at everything that needed to be
looked at and, as a result kind
of came up with the umbrella ideas being
quite a strong link to the artist.
Well, there you are folks, that was
the process that I went through to
rebrand, Simply Jack Vettriano.
In the future I plan to do a video
which will cover a brand identity project
where there is no pre-existing
logo design and we'll go through the
sketching, researching,
concept stage and the
final build to the finalised logo design.
I hope you find this video useful.
If you have make sure you give the video
a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel
if you haven't already
and share this video
with any friends or colleagues, you think
might find it useful, and until I see you
next time, stay creative folks.
