It’s interesting that even small one-man-bands these days are recognising the importance of branding their businesses. So I thought I would live dangerously and attempt to explain to process I went through in coming up with their logo.
It all starts with the brief from the client.
In this case he had a few fixed ideas about what he wanted:
• Firstly the name he’d chosen ‘TOOLS 2 GO’ needed to feature the figure 2 (not the word ‘to’)
• Secondly the colour scheme was to be yellow and black. The reason for this was his love for the well known DEWALT logo, a brand leader in the tools game.
Incidentally, yellow is also a colour often associated with low cost, no frills, types of businesses. You only have to think about ‘Smart Buy’ and ‘Pak n Save’ to know what I mean. This potential perception would probably not hurt his business especially in the current economic climate.
As far as fonts go the DEWALT logo uses a very simple, manly font with no frills which I’m sure is part of its appeal.
So, the first thing I did was get started with some different fonts and concepts to see what might work...
I often like to explore the possibility of using some kind of graphic in my logos but in this case my initial efforts were looking either too detailed or they were overpowering the name too much. In the image above you can see I was exploring how much ‘graphic’ input the logo should contain. In order to achieve a simple, manly result it would need to be a case of “less is more”. I needed to keep this thing really simple.
Also the right balance of colours would be important (ie. yellow and black). This would become more important if it ever needed to be reversed onto a black background. It would need to work equally well both ways. I also liked the idea of giving it a focal point by using a splash of one additional colour: RED.
As for the font. I liked the chunky, chiselled “Machine” font which had a tough manly feel about it. So there were some aspects of the initial concepts that I liked but others would definitely have to go. This is what I came up with...
The client liked the idea of a toolbox graphic, although initially he thought it was a suitcase. For me the idea of a toolbox lent itself well to being simplified down to a very simple, basic shape (more so than the delivery van idea) and yet it was still recognisable and emphasised well the mobile aspect of his business, especially with the word GO right there on that part of the logo.
The client was very pleased. So was I, so I used it in an advertisement for my logo design service which I placed recently on the classifiedpages website. Check it out here: logo designer north shore.
I also created a reversed version with his tag line added to be used as his website header.
