Trademark Design
Goal: Create conceptual trademarks for two different companies, with each trademark combining two ideas or images to represent the company and their mission
Role: Design Lead
Timeline: 3 weeks
Design Strategy | Visual Design
Overview
A trademark helps build a company’s identity and is an important part of telling a company’s story. This project gave me the opportunity to quickly create and execute conceptual trademarks for existing companies.
Research and Ideation
I started by developing a creative brief for each company to define the target audience, communication goals, value propositions, and desired tone. I created word lists and explored imagery options, and then moved into developing and refining hand-drawn sketches of logos. I translated hand-drawn logo sketches into digital format using Illustrator and added typography, ensuring that the logotype displayed harmoniously at small and large sizes. Peer design reviews informed design decisions throughout.
Final Designs
Black Cat Books
Black Cat Books is a small bookstore specializing in the buying and selling of fine used books. From vintage collectibles to rare first editions, Black Cat Books seeks to find hidden gems. For this logo, I turned the spine of a book into a cat silhouette. To pay homage to the theme of vintage, I chose to overlay a subtle stamp texture. Want to see their existing website? Check it out here.
Lantern Moon
Lantern Moon is a knitting and crochet supply company originating from Vietnam. Their needles are handcrafted by artisans from premium wood. For this logo, I combined iconic Vietnamese lanterns with knitting and yarn imagery. The simplistic geometric pattern of the lantern references artisan woodblock patterns, imagery that Lantern Moon currently uses in their branding. Want to see their existing website? Check it out here.
Conclusion & Personal Takeaways
This project gave me an opportunity to flex and stretch my visual design skills while I practiced bringing together different concepts and finding patterns that enabled those concepts to combine effortlessly. I conducted scrappy user feedback through my design process, and in an ideal world, I would do this at scale to assess how well the designs communicated the intended ideas.
Through this project, I honed my Adobe Illustrator skills and importantly, learned to quickly crank out design ideas that aimed to connect with users. Learning to use Illustrator’s Polar Grid tool was a real ‘Aha’ moment!