This is my second year doing work for the International Climbers Festival. Last year I built the website and started to get my feet wet with doing social media work for the ICF. This year, Brian Fabel, a friend and ICF board member, has put together a creative team, also known as the marketing advisory council, for the festival. We are currently in concept mode.
We spent two meetings talking about the look and feel of the festival in years past, and what we feel the brand should get across. We heard from long-time board members about the history surrounding the festival. We also made a mind map about climbing and wyoming. We plan to have a systems book by the end of concept phase for everyone to pull from. Think of it as a unified design guide for everything from the website to the festival tickets.
What’s in a Systems Book?
- Black & White Logo, Color Logo
- Typeface, Secondary Typeface
- Patterns
- Color Palette
- The Brand Mission (In One Sentence)
- Examples of Designed Materials (t-shirt, billboard, website, etc.)
I am currently knee-deep in thumbnails for the logo. Check out some of my ideas and let me know what you think.
Steps to Creating a Logo
- When creating a logo it is important to make sure it’s something simple, creative, original, and that it works well in black & white and at any size.
- A good way to start with a logo is to come up with 3 to 5 themes. Come up with 3 logo ideas for each theme and draw out each idea 20 different ways as rough as possible. That should give you around 300 logos to look at.
- Have a few friends that don’t mind hurting your feelings to give you honest opinions of your concepts. They might see something in the idea that is good or something that is horribly bad, something you never considered. A good critique session is critical at each phase of design.
- Narrow the thumbnails down to 5 logo ideas to develop and create about 20 evolved sketches for each. Have another critique session.
- Continue to narrow, refine, and critique the logo a few more times and you should have something pretty much done.
- Once the logo is near-finalized start to bring in colors and type, play around with positioning and size.
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