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 he original request made to me on August 20th
by Brian Goetz, the President of Quiotix Corporation, was concerning
web site design, although we soon agreed that creating a company
logo was the thing to start with. A logo is the
foundation for the entire corporate identity package, so if a
company's web site is going to make use of the logo, this logo
should be ready before the web design work can even begin.
For five years, the company's logo was simply
text with its name set in Avant Garde font, colored purple, and
usually oriented vertically in the top left or right corner of the
page. You can see an example of the logo on their original site---whose simplicity,
admittedly, well complements the austerity of the logo. The
client hinted that I might use some of the original logo's aspects
(font, color, or position) in my design, but eventually I departed
far away from this prototype.
In fact, even the first three samples I submitted to Brian (see
Fig. 1) weren't in any way similar to the original Avant Garde
logo. I usually start by presenting a number of quite different logo
drafts, eliciting feedback and trying to identify my customer's
tastes and preferences. Then, I narrow the "stylistic scope" by
creating new variations close to the one chosen at the previous
stage, and by repeating this procedure over and over I finally zero
in on the most satisfying version.
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Fig. 1: The first three logo drafts |
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In this particular case, the convergence rate was good from the
start; of the first three samples, the first one faced a warm
welcome while the other two weren't approved at all. In fact, the
visuals in logos (b) and (c) are much more convenient-looking than
that of (a); the (a) also has the advantage of its shape remotely
resembling "Q", the initial letter in the company's name. Finally,
the asymmetry of (a) seemed to be more in tune with the taste of my
customer than the more traditional layouts of (b) and (c).
Thus, I moved on trying to improve upon Fig. 1 (a). My
first attempt was rather radical (Fig 2): I changed the font and
transformed the rectangle into a perfect square; also, I adjusted
the rotation angle of the square so that the inside "sleeves"
(a bit streamlined) run precisely into the square's corners. The
idea behind all these changes was to make the logo more compact,
more tightly integrated, and less "sketchy."
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Fig. 2: A proposed improvement of Fig. 1 (a) |
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The effect, however, was not positive. Brian felt that the original
variant (Fig. 1, a) was better in nearly all respects: the
font, shape and slant of the visual. I started to realize that
although tight coordination and symmetry are thought to be necessary
for a good logo, sometimes asymmetry and a bit of "looseness" may
work better. Actually, it may be argued whether one of
Fig. 1 (a) and Fig. 2 is really better than the
other. Undoubtedly, however, these two versions are quite
different in style, so the best thing that a sensible designer can
do in this situation is to attend to the customer's preferences.
After a couple of compromise attempts shown on Fig. 3 (where I
made the visual more rectangular while preserving the new design of
the sleeves, returned to the original font, and tried out a
different rotation angle), we had arrived at the final image as on
Fig. 4. In fact, the only significant difference of Fig. 4
from Fig. 1 (a) is a better coordination of the text with
the visual: Note that the first "I" stands exactly against the
middle of the top sleeve's mouth, and one of the strokes of the "X"
is almost a continuation of the rectangle's top-right side.
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Fig. 3: Looking for a compromise between Fig. 1 (a) and Fig. 2 |
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The story of the "Q" lettershapes deserves a paragraph of its own.
The original letter of the Optima typeface used in the logo
(Fig. 5, a) was not suitable because its descender stretches
far to the bottom of the letter, thus making it difficult to fit the
title into the "slot" of the visual. My first attempt to compose a
"fixed-height" Q (Fig. 5, b) was inspired by the Erika typeface
used in the version on Fig. 2; its additional advantage is that
the horizontal descender of the letter visually supports the shape
of the horizontally oriented sleeve. However, with the light-weight
Optima font, such a "Q" is hardly readable in small sizes (which is
important, because the company's name is not a recognizable word),
so we finally chose the more traditional design of Fig.5 (c). Later,
I used the same "Q" shape in all labels and headings on the site
which used the Optima font.
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The Optima font was considered optimal (pun intended) for this
logo because it's not exactly a sans-serif font (the strokes are a
bit expanded at the ends) but not a serif font either. Serifs,
whose purpose is to guide the eye along the line, would be an
overkill given the strong horizontal "guides" of the sleeve in which
the text flows. On the other hand, a classic sans serif font
such as Freeset or Erika (used in Fig. 2) might seem rather
dull with this visual.
The story of this logo project is instructive in two ways. First,
you can see here how time-consuming it may be to fiddle with really
minute changes: it took only 20% of the total logo design time to
create Fig. 1 (a), and 80%, to advance from it to Fig. 4.
Second, when you do a job for someone, you should remember that it's
your customer, not you, who's going to live with the design you
create and to become accustomed to presenting it as something of
their own. You may spend your time explaining yourself and
even educating your customer if you feel that this may lead them to
accept your point of view, but you can't argue. In most
cases, you must accept what you're told even if you feel you're
making a step backwards.
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