I’ve created a brand identity design recently that I think is a well designed piece … memorable and appealing as well as being original for it’s industry. Its modern and yet should stand the test of time in it’s simplicity.

What is very strange though, is considering myself and the client are so happy with the design, as to why the concept was preceded by about 3 days of hellish creative block - in fact the worst creative block I’ve experienced in 7yrs.

I was required to develop a brand identity for an IT service that develops and implements extremely complex IT solutions into equally feature rich solutions that are a no longer complex or confusing for the end user.

Thus it was vital that the logo conveyed the concept of simplicity. I also felt it should in convey the spirit of a highly professional company (target market is ‘corporates’) with business efficiency and growth at the heart of it’s goals for it’s customer base via easy to use internal IT systems.

Total Creative Block
At the outset of the design process I did several eye pleasing concepts and yet none of them felt right. I became quite obsessed with having to convey simplicity with the design (simplicity and yet meaning), and after two days of creative block was literally banging my head against the table and sitting with my husband and 7yr old daughter getting them to brainstorm random images of ’simplicity for me’.

I was theorising that maybe to break my creative block, I needed to think outside the box and tap into the innocent mind of a child, lol.

An interesting paper sketch exercise resulting in some intriguing images from my daughter … an icecream (!) a circle (not bad), a rainbow, a cat(!!) ha ha… not that my husbands ideas were any better scarily enough.

I left it for the the day to give my brain a rest, and on the morning of the third day sat at my screen again (paper hadn’t worked) and stared at it some more.

Suddenly an idea came to me. At last, and it seemed like it could be a very good one.

The Concept
An idea of ‘growth’ and ‘tree arrows’ suddenly came to me and knew that I wanted to create upward pointing arrows to represent trees. The trees would be an image of ‘the calm and simplicity of nature’ and yet a powerful business growth representation at the same time.

In the below concept the arrows imply business growth/efficiency/profits and of course at the same time they are trees, which in the same way that arrows can … also represent growth. The image of trees (and their simple rendering, which has been based on the letter A within the text) brings an air of ‘calm’ and simplicity to the design, to convey that Saptrans is about bringing ease and simplicity to complex IT systems.

The colours were selected because Saptrans had expressed an interest in both colours, but their shade (and indeed the entire concept itself) was I feel very likely influenced by my viewing a few months ago of the artistic works of Eve Duhamel. Not a graphic designer or logo designer, but an artist with exceptional and vibrant work.

As soon as the idea of growth arrow ‘trees’ popped into my mind, I knew that I wanted them stylised in a similar manner to the drawings I had seen in Eve Duhamels art … in that I wanted them bright and colourful against the more plain colouration of the company name.

Indeed this matched the design brief as Saptrans had also expressed an interest in muted colours in stark contrast against bright colours.

If you look at some of Eve’s beautiful art work below you can see how there is an interesting influence within the Saptrans concept and how easily it’s possible that when little arrow trees came into my head, that subconsciously I remembered Eve’s little arrow trees.

View more of Eve’s work >>

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Art, Design Inspiration, Design Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.