the spark...

A Whole New Look

As Brightspark was fast approaching its second anniversary, I thought it was time for a bit of a revamp and an overall re-brand that would more closely reflect what the business is all about. 

As with most branding projects, I find it best to start with the logo. Once this is established it’s easier to have a feel for everything to follow. It really works as a foundation stone and is the beginning of the visual language of the brand. 

Designing for myself proved to be much more difficult than designing for others. Possibly because it’s pretty hard to be objective when you’re the client as well as the designer. I made the initial mistake of not following the logo design processes I would normally employ for any client. This always involves asking lots of questions and finding out all I can about the target market and discovering exactly how the business is to be positioned.

Once I changed tack and approached the task as if I was working for somebody else, I felt much more comfortable and the project began to slot into place.

Before finally designing a logo I was happy with, I had quite a few misses, dead ends and outright rejects. I thought I’d dip into this ‘not really doing it for me’ pile and show you a few here. Some are no more than initial ideas, quick scribbles, underdeveloped thoughts or just plain old wrong. They do however, give a glimpse into the process that goes in to designing a logo and charts the slightly shaky path to the Brightspark mark that sits at the top of this page.

This is the old logo, I’m getting quite teary eyed and nostalgic just looking at it.

Although this logo is fine and served me well, I feel that it veers uncomfortably close to being a bit bland. Now the business has been going for a couple of years I have a much clearer idea of what direction I want to continue moving in and the overall image I would like to portray.

I began by sketching, doodling and scribbling dozens of ideas. I worked some of these up into loose concepts. You can see a few below:-

When I felt I had enough workable ideas, I began developing them further on the mac. I decided to pretty much stick with the colours from my previous branding for continuity and because I plain old like them:-

I felt like I wanted to move away from the physical fiery spark of the previous logo. I decided to focus more on the original idea of Brightspark which is about hiring an individual or a slightly geeky group of specialist ‘bright sparks’. In an effort to make the logo more personal and to try and portray this geek factor, I began to develop the idea of glasses and some sort of face. I wanted to avoid anything too cartoonish and keep it simple and clean. After much head scratching and paper crumpling, the final result is below:-

I feel like this is much more what Brightspark is about and has the simple, iconic look I was going for. But what do you think? I’d really like to hear your thoughts on the new branding, so why not drop me a comment if you get a sec.