Thursday, February 26, 2015

Trans CAD trucking company

“We need a logo for our trucking company. Do what ever you want, but do us something good!”
I’ve done several trucking logos over the years. They are always fun. My brief was movement, modern and keep it simple. This logo had certain givens like… an italic font, a bold or black weight, and explore a slab or a sans serif typeface.
The color palette was going to be easy because the owners love pro football. Immediately I thought of an orange and blue or black combination; Broncos, Colts, Bengals, Cleveland… aggressive visuals. Wonderful ingredients.
Some logos are a type solution from the get-go. One of the things I learned in design school that has helped me all my life is… keep an idea file. Look and save for the future. 
I remembered a Brazilian logo that I saved because of the lowercase “a”. After a couple of hours searching the Net I downloaded 5 fonts similar to the Brazilian letter "a" and starting playing around. 
The last thing I worked on was the icon. Started sketching arrow tips and boomerangs with coloured pencils. Bing bang boom…. TransCAD is born.

Alegría Series of Buildings

The project brief required a logo that could be used on a series of 10 residencial buildings to be built over a 5 year period. 
The client also wanted to create a brand name that would unify the series. In the market names of European cities was common. The client wanted to go beyond that and create a name that had a reason why... something positive.
The winning concept was “Alegría”. Translated into English it is a blend of “happiness and joy”. "Alegría" was translated into 9 different languages. It was important that the translations be short words and easy to pronounce in Spanish with less than 3 syllables.
I set up 3 simple parameters to give the series structure and continuity: 1.) a sans serif font that wouldn't age with time, 2.) a simple icon that could be painted with different colours and 3.) a common color for the name.
The color palette was built from the colours of each country; Turkey, Italy, Spain, China, etc.