Group Project

http://andywheeler23.wix.com/pickledome
WEBSITE

Our company is called Pickle Dome. It is a local company that sells products and services related to the sport of Pickle Ball. Locally located and serving the diverse age ranges of young students who play outdoor sports to the retirement community who already are fond of this low impact sport.

[ Pickleball is a sport  that combines elements of badminton, tennis, and table tennis. Over the past few years, pickleball has gained a huge audience and is blowing up everywhere. Pickledome is your newest premier pickleball shop that is guaranteed to take your skills to the next level. ]

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I was assigned the objective of creating a Logo for our company which would adequately describe our company's fun and laid back local nature.  I then had the assignment of creating a style guide to create continuity between group projects.

In Logo design client feedback is imperative in coming up with the ideas, shapes, colors and feel that will eventually come to be the finished logo. For this assignment I mentally categorized my fellow study group members as the client. Their input on what would be our company's visual identity was key, and was also very important to their work as they would have to put that logo into each of their product designs as well. Brand recognition = Brand awareness = repeat customers.

I initially created sketches for this product that were a mixture of literal dome and pickle imagery and more simple visual balance generated by the letters P and D, p and d. While each of these ideas had merit, the group input I received indicated a preference for the last idea on my sketch page. It features the two words Pickle and Dome with paddles for the game and a substitution of the letter O as an image of a pickle ball. We chose a group of colors to work with that basically meant tennis court colors; clay red, court green and court blue. Not specific until I found images to take color samples from.

So I had a logo idea to go through, with an idea of what the finished project would look like. Time to design.

My thinking on the design was that it would by necessity be scale-able, able to be placed on many different articles and products in order to be useful to the company in creating brand identity. To make this work, I chose to use the graphics program of Adobe Illustrator. Its ability to place type and shape in mathematical vectors makes it agile in scaling up or down in size.

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I now needed visual elements

These images I found online were to be essential elements with which I would construct my final logo. I would take the colors and shapes of these two pictures and turn them into scale-able vector images that would provide visual interest and help to explain at a glance what our product is within our logo. The top image is a paddle and ball that are used to play pickle ball. The bottom image is a hollow plastic ball with holes in its sides sometimes called a wiffleball or in this case a pickleball.
Visually simple images that represent the sport/lifestyle we are attempting to sell.

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Now for colors.

These two images I found of the sport of pickleball delivered the colors I needed for our logo and style guide. I sampled the greens, blues, reds, and yellows on display and picked those that worked well together on a white background. Contrast being key to legibility and brand recognition.

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Prototype phase: what works in the designs and what does not.

Picking brand fonts is a challenge. While picking ours I happily stumbled upon the font Phosphate and fell for it as a visual element in our logo. The idea that the white lines on the colored letters visulally referenced the lines and colors of a tennis court was perfect to my sense of visual thought recognition. I presented these images to the group with their visual differences and asked what people thought. The immediate response was positive and favored the font I liked and the colors of the second image but with the more squared off second line of the third and fourth choices. The dome and paddle on the second line are made more square with the first line using kerning between characters. The P and D were to be dropped from within the paddles as the group did not like the cluttered look of them. Color was preferred over black lettering.

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I then presented these four images to the client and asked for final input as the time was running out on what was needed before they could implement  the logo into their products. The second and third images have the colors swapped for the words with green on top and red on bottom, the third has black outlines outlines around and inside the letters, the fourth has the inner white line removed and a court blue background. The first choice was favored over the others. No other changes were needed except making sure the lines would be white all the time, not clear so that the color of the medium on which the logo was printed would show through.

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I presented this final image to the client in a wide variety of file formats so that they could make it fit into whichever programs they were working on, including PNG format which has transparency wherever there is no defined color instead of white background.

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Lastly I created a style guide to unite this logo with the information of its construction as well as a list of fonts that would be acceptable to our company's visual style. I completed it with a list of colors as well as their designations on the CMYK RGB and HEX numbering systems. I provided visual representations of the fonts in use within the font category at the bottom.

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Annalysis

When analyzing the logo by itself I came up with a number of ideas using the gestalt principles of design. I wanted the logo to be visually striking, with a dynamic placement of letters and images that would be memorable and fun.
A balanced top and bottom works to promote a sense of visual strength and harmony. The weight of each line is the same due to kerning on the bottom. The contrast of the warm red over the more cool green is playfully disrupted by the intense yellow that is the O replacing pickle ball. The paddles to the sides of the words are visual clues as to the purpose of the company.  The diagonal line created by the words positioning creates a sense of motion and action. This is a sport company and I feel that this logo helps to identify it as such.