What makes a strong visual identity and logo design? Design and colors definitely are not nearly as important, but most important is to build an image that fully represents its owners and to be accepted or adopted by its owners. Branding, `identity and logos don't exist if they are not used, and in order to be used, they must fully represent its owners and be widely and proudly used by them.
What cannot be seen by looking at the final logo is the first half of the process. As an entire TEAM needed the logo and Visual identity, it was very important that the entire TEAM works towards building one, everyone's opinion is heard and represented in the branding.
In order to achieve that, big part of the creative process involved all 15 team members in the shape of multiple workshop that spanned over a few days. The process took the following steps:
1. Questionnaire
As a first step, it was important to align with all team member's on the services the team provides, keywords that relate to the team members and the culture. And the keywords were: Innovative, Diverse, Creative, Friendly, Supportive, Happy, Simple, Fun, Fresh. At this point was also important to clarify where, when and how would the logo and VI be used.
After all team members were aligned on the vision of the team, the ideation process began. All members came up with various, creative and sometimes goofy names that represent the team, and that was followed by voting. The name with the highest votes was obviously "Spark".
3. Sketching
Usually this task would be done entirely by the designer, but again, in order to make team members feel more connected to the process and the identity, I made this a team exercise.
4. Designing
While some great (and some not so great ;)) ideas come out of the Sketching exercise, there was a bit of a pattern in what seemed to be hand drawn motives, to indicate the creativity of the team. That played a major role in shaping the final logo.
The Design process
The approach for this logo is to make a simple and memorable logo that can look both, serious enough for a team in a bank and at the same time to give enough possibilities to be playful and to represent the teams’ character and diversity of skills and cultures.
The hand drawn spark is a representation of the hands-on creativity and in combination with the lower case “spark” wording, it gives the logo an approachable, casual, and almost a start-up feel to it.
When used as a stand alone element, the logo can look very modest, simple and non demanding, and at the same time, with the usage of colors and the logo’s color variation, it can be very playful and exciting. This playfulness is important and can play an important role in publicity within RBI. We are the “new kids on the block” and being seen and standing out from the rest is very important.
The spark logo mark and in general the tone of voice of the logo give plenty of opportunities for creative “playing” with it.
