OUGD403 - Studio Brief 01 - Final Designs

In all of these designs you can see various elements from my initial design sketches that I have continued to work with, such as the use of Futura, ligatures, and adding serifs to certain letterforms.
Fig. 1 and 2 show my first two designs, both very similar with the only differences being that fig. 2 uses serifs on the me ligature and has a thicker line around the letterforms of the first section, whereas fig. 1 uses thinner line weights and has no serifs added. The decision to cut out the last letter e in the word presume was made in considering how the word is spoken, as typically the last letter isn't pronounced. However, instead I separated the last two letters to create a ligature 'me' to represent the idea of a high-end perfume being self-indulgent and a scent unique to particular individuals. And the use of wide-spread kerning in these designs represents brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Versace and Bvlgari, suggesting sophistication and a clean layout.

Producing these logotypes in monochrome and avoiding the use of colour was another design decision of mine, as I did not want colour to distract the logotypes away from the idea of being 'classy'. Black and white is quite a clean and neutral colour scheme, with black also suggesting sophistication.

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2.

One piece of feedback I gained from an interim crit of my initial idea sketches recommended that I experiment with using the ligature designs to create a logo in themselves. This idea can be seen incorporated into my other designs shown in Fig. 4 and 5, as well as the logo for Calvin Klein. The kerning in these three designs isn't as wide as that shown in fig. 1 and 2 because I did not want the individual letterforms to seem disjointed where the ligature has been used within the word rather than isolated from it.

Fig. 3.

Fig. 4.

Fig. 5 shows my final chosen design. I chose this design because I felt that it worked more than any of my other designs to represent all the essential characteristics of a perfume brand I have already mentioned previously. Not only this but I feel the ligature is a lot cleaner and smooth than any of the others I had tried, and it is the part of the word in which most emphasis is put on when spoken. I wanted to create a logo for a brand in which people would instantly recognise from a couple of letters rather than the whole brand name, and I feel as though I have achieved this through the use of ligatures. However, if I were to improve on this design I would perhaps use bracketed serifs rather than non-bracketed to create a better sense of luxury, as at the moment it looks more like a general cosmetics brand rather than a high-end perfume.

Fig. 5.