I've been researching existing museum branding to see what works, and what is suitable. Its helped me think about what I need to bare in mind when creating my logo.
I need something which can be applied to a variety of products, would work in black and white or with a variety of colours, works at different sizes, is easy to read and understand and is relevant to the subject of graphic design. It shouldn't be too complicated to do all of these things and to still be understandable if it was placed over a more detailed image.
It needs to be appealing to both people with an interest in graphic design, and to a general audience who may want to learn more about the subject. So I don't want the design to go too 'hipster' or anything as I want people of all ages to appreciate it.
I also want to make sure it looks classy, like the V&A logo which I looked at, because it needs to stand the test of time, as a museum can't keep updating its logo to fit in with the graphic design trends.
I've started out by just trying different logo ideas for the letters MGD, as the museum is the Museum of Graphic Design. I've tried to relate the logos to the theme but some look a little random.
This is the same image but you can see in yellow I've circled the ones I liked best. I've also been asking others their opinions and luckily they picked the same logo designs that I had liked the best to continue to work with.
I then tried out some logos included the title of the museum as otherwise I was a bit worried it wouldn't be obvious what it was for, seeing as its not well known as it will be new.
Again I've circled the ones I liked best, asking for feedback about these from others.
People have said:
- Be careful that the text you use doesn't look too futuristic and therefore science like
- Make sure the logo represents graphic design
- Keep the box as it makes it unique
- Try it on a slant
- Works better with the text included
- Hand drawn style works well
Heres a close up of the logo I like the best, which I then tried playing around with a bit more.
Now, I quite like the logo in the bottom right, as it would be more sophisticated with a timeless sans serif font, but still looks a bit unique with the box around it.
This is the logo that I like best that I will try re-creating in illustrator.
Here are some attempts to re-create the first logo design. I've traced over my hand drawn text to make this in to type, but I don't think this idea works very well on screen as it doesn't look as professional as using and editing an existing font would do.
Playing around with re-creating the logo digitally was harder than I thought because of the important decision of font choice.
