Working in the modern world as an independent creative is, on occasion, an incredibly rewarding experience. I was contacted in late 2010 by AgileScout.com to help develop a unique brand statement — a logo and mascot character design for a website about a new way to develop software. You mean, combine almost everything I do into one amazing project? Yes, please!
We developed the logo, meant to fit cleanly into the new world of post web-2.0 marks like twitter, vimeo, mobileme and others, simultaneously with the mascot character. (It’s worth noting to other designers here that this client originally tried working with those logo-on-demand services and came away completely unsatisfied with the experience.)
After a short style-research phase (above), we chose a contrasting-type system based on two high-quality typefaces available through Veer, Skolar and Bree:
After choosing our typefaces, we set the name of the site to give priority to “Agile” (the methodology for development), and set about sexy-ing up the mark with color and graphic stylings. At this point I happily abandoned pretty much every lesson I was taught in design school about blends, transparency, and gradations of color; that they are useless special effects used to hide poor design. I’ve come to realize (as has most the rest of the world) that if the underlaying structure is solid, you can layer on about anything you want without the design falling apart.
First, color options were set against neutrals…
…and it was decided to utilize a more active color system (Agile is a very dynamic method of development, we didn’t really want any part of this mark to feel like it was “at rest”). Once we settled into our colors, I mocked-up several samples of effects to choose from, some subtle, some purposely over-the-top, but none I would have been uncomfortable sending out into the world.
And the final mark was parsed out of those:
I often feel that type-only logos get a bad rap. While I often feel that a designer should alter the type after setting it to ensure a mark that is unique enough to withstand easy reproduction, in this case I felt strongly that the letterforms were just perfect the way they were. The lowercase letter “g”, set in Bree Bold Italic, just makes me want to give it hug.
While all of this was happening, we were creating the mascot. Several sites have these little guys running around the margins, like Social Media Examiner, and AgileScout wanted the same feeling. What we didn’t want, however, was a little bug-looking guy from a PBS cartoon. It was decided to aim for an older target, and to key in on a dynamic character design based on agility (right?) and movement.
Through a series of sketches, we slowly honed in on the design:
I hope you can tell how much fun I was having at this point.
After narrowing-down the character’s clothing and posture, body-type and accessories, we picked a head and went to final. I chose to stick to a mostly-flat, Saturday-morning anime shading style, and added some ink-blot flair to the backgrounds. We wanted a very dynamic character that could be used in a variety of settings and contexts, and always felt like he was a second away from leaping off to some great adventure. I’m very happy with where we ended up. You can see more examples in the Illustration Gallery and, of course, at AgileScout.com!
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