Design process

Crosswater Rebrand

• Initial Ideas/Development

Firstly, we began by researching into existing type based logos (as seen in the previous post). We also started to look into some of the books each of us have bought over the summer such as; 100 ideas that changed Graphic Design, Logo Life, The Art of Looking Sideways ect to find any examples of using typography in logos, brands and images or just interesting ways typography has been used. These where some of the ones we though would benefit us the most. We really liked the 'I' one because it looked like we could use something similar to it due to it resembling water pipes but in the end we agreed that all of these were good examples but for what we where aiming for it just didn't fit in with our modern bathroom theme.

We also found a video  from a graphic designer on what his process is on how he goes about choosing a font to use. After watching this, it really helped us with which font to choose from Vignelli's six basic fonts:

http://www.ucreative.com/articles/watch-one-graphic-designers-font-selection-process/

To help us with the deciding process we typed up Crosswater in each of the typefaces. Out of all of them, the two we liked the most was Futura and Helvetica, and because they where Sans Serif fonts, they looked much more modern compared to their serif counterparts. This is the message we wanted to try to portray in our logo and we thought these 2 typefaces did it well so we started looking into how each font these typefaces looked with the company
name.

 

After that, we began to sketch down some initial ideas. We created a wordbank from the terminology that Crosswater uses to describe both itself as a company and the products they make to help us come up with some interesting
logo designs. One of the ideas I sketched up that I quite liked was using the 'R' and the 'T' to create what looks like a tap and sink but due to the nature of the company it just looked too cartoony for the modern look we where going for and because of this it didn't fit. 

When we got our ideas down on paper, we decided which ones we liked the look of and began to make some digital mock ups on Photoshop/Illustrator. I have to admit that we did find it challenging to create a purely typographical Logo for the company, especially while restricted in using only one of Vignelli's six basic typefaces. To help with this, we started to create concept designs with Helvetica Light and as you can see, Beth and Polly started to try to deform the letters 'S' and 'O' from 'Crosswater' into a water droplet. This ended up working really well and once we started to manipulatem some of the letters from Crosswater we found that we could create a tap based on one of the company's 
latest sink based products out of the R at the end of Crosswater which fits in great with the full stop (the water droplet) at the end. This Subtle little touch is very effective in telling the audience that this is a modern bathroom company. We all thought this was the way to go with our final logo design, so I gathered some colours from both the website and images of their products so we could chose a colour scheme for our final logo. We settled with using a lighter shade of grey to represent the sheen from there stainless steel taps and a light blue to just empathise the droplet.