Grow – A Logo Design Process
December 27, 2010This post looks in-depth at how I came up with a logo for Grow Community Gardens, a not-for-profit community based charity in Northern Ireland, looking for a brand identity and a website to raise awareness of their cross-community work in Belfast. I will talk a bit about the brief, guidelines and my logo thought process.
The Client Brief
The lovely Siobhan Craig from Grow Community Gardens came to speak to us in University of Ulster Belfast about our final year live project. I took my seat and unleashed my two moleskins for writing down key words that I’d hear throughout the clients speech. I was delighted when I heard that it was a charity that Siobhan was in charge of and that I’d have to help her by creating a Grow Community Gardens website. As well as expanding my own portfolio, I’d be giving something of great use back to the community. A lot of the people working for Grow find it hard to afford a few meals a day and luxuries are difficult to come by for a few of the gardening volunteers who only receive meal tokens every week from the government.
Siobhan made it very clear that Grow is not the same as allotments, grow-your-own or renting a space to garden. Grow is all about bringing the community together, sharing space and spending quality time with new friends. Grow is about meeting people and strengthening the local community.
Anyone is welcome to come and help Grow, who have two gardens based near the Waterworks and Helen’s Bay. Grow welcome different ages, races and religions to come and spend time with the rest of the community in their gardens, which are open for majority of the year.
The peace fence around the area at the Waterworks is ideal for sweet pea, which locals often pick through the fence. Volunteers at Grow use common gardening tools and with the help of poly-tunnels, are able to grow courgettes, tomatoes, brocolli, basil and plenty more.
They often have community days, involving plenty of carrots, cooking, and craic. The Mayor of Belfast even attended one of the events so the cooking had to be top class. The team know the supreme quality of their own produce and Siobhan remarked that the fresh tasting vegetables are unrivaled in the Belfast area.
Crucial 20
When it comes to creating something for a client, research is critical, whether it be a logo or an entire website. Getting to know the company, client and reasons behind why they need your services are paramount. Research provides us with a vital foundation to base our work off of and get to know the project area as well as, if not better than the client.
I found a fantastic list of questions at the design cubicle to ask a client before designing a logo. Fortunately we had some time to ask the client questions at the end of the brief. I was a bit disappointed not to get a one-to-one with the client due to our class size being just under one hundred students.
A great help to me was the client brief documentation, collected, organized and shortened by the fantastic Nicklas Persson. He went out of his way to ensure every student had accurate, valuable information and specific content requested by the client.
It wouldn’t be professional of me to copy and paste this all over the web, but I’ve picked out some key points and merged them with the client brief notes above.
I was able to find out the answers to most of the questions I had using the client brief and technical brief combined. Here are a few I’ve picked out;
How can the products/services of the company be described?
Started in 2008, Grow is a small charity working with communities to create community gardens in their area. It’s as much about growing community as it is about growing food and flowers!
What are the long term goals of the company?
To expand the community helping Grow by getting more people involved! There are currently a number of action days and cooking/healthy eating days. These will continue at Grow.
Grow will continue to support, represent and promote community-managed gardens, allotments and other green spaces, creating opportunities for local communities to grow. Grow will continue to work empower local people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities to build better communities and make a positive impact on the surrounding environment.
Why does the company require a logo? What should the new logo accomplish?
The company does not have a thoughtful, suitable, well-designed logo at present. The new logo should reflect the personality of the company and the hard working, charismatic personalities of the individuals within it.
Who are the main competitors?
This was a difficult one for me to answer. Can a charity have rivals? I believe they hope to earn as much money as possible to help their cause and inspire people but wouldn’t have “rivals” as such. Charities are all working for the greater good and should support each other if anything.
How is the company different from competitors?
Although I don’t believe Grow has rivals, there are obviously other charities out there. Grow is different from other charities and allotments due to its community focus. I was able to locate a number of other community gardens from belfastcity.gov.uk which states:
In terms of the Council’s current provision, the Committee has given approval to community gardens at:
- several school projects in the west of the city;
- Waterworks;
- Derelict land adjacent to Ballysillan allotments;
- Glenbank (Peace III);
- Glen Community Centre (Peace III); and
- Suffolk (Peace III).
Another great link from the site is http://www.belfastcity.gov.uk/beinggreen/growyourown.asp which outlines the benefits of growing your own food!
Imagining the Grow Brand
Siobhan’s outlined some of her favourite websites, similar to the one I’d be creating. They were CommunityGarden.org and parkrun.com/home.aspx. Her two least favourite were farmgarden.org.uk, giyireland.com and thrive.org.uk. The existing Grow brand and website can be found at growwaterworks.blogspot.com.
Mind-Mapping
The first thing I wanted to do was get some ideas on paper. The Standardistas paper prototyping lecture really taught me the significance of this and why it is important not to jump straight onto the computer. The first thing I did, was jot down key words relating to the project. I wanted to get as many as possible, broadening the scope of possible logo designs.
Click to see my first GROW mind-map
You can see from the mind-map above how I divided the words into broad groups such as “Charity”, “Area” and “Gardening”. This way, I was able to get more words than expected as I didn’t purely have Community Gardens running through my mind the whole time. Words like “Pride”, “Awareness” and “Opportunities” came out of this method. I can assure you those words would not have come out of just one heading plonked in the middle of the page.
The next stage was to narrow this down and pick out my favorite words. By “Favorite”, I mean the words I felt related to the brief and summarized the aura that I felt from the grow team.
Click to see my second GROW mind-map
As you can see from the mind-map above, I began to link words and become more specific in the direction I wanted to go. The arrows show my thought process and how I saw things relating. These words were the ones I wanted to use to help me come up with a logo. After a quick look at 20 stupid mistakes logo designers make and 45 nature inspired logos, I was ready to go.
Concepting
I began drawing out logo ideas in my moleskin. There were of course a few ridiculous cliches like the shaking hands thing that could really be used for any business and wasn’t specific enough. I realized relating gardening to community was certainly going to be a challenge. You’ll see from the sketches below how I pretty much covered everything from worms and gardening tools to, well…drawings that weren’t meant to look the way they did.
Click to see GROW logo sketeches
Three great ideas came out of my sketching. Well, two and a dodgy looking one that could have some sort of sexual connotation. Lets get that one out of the way first.
The Community Spade
The idea behind this one was to use a spade to represent the community. The spade is a tool that I see as really representing gardening. To tie it in with community, I changed the actual spade head to be heart shaped. I also broke the spade into segments, showing the coming-togetherness of the community. I think you’ll understand why I changed the end of the spade to green instead of heart-colored pink.
The first idea was a spade with a heart-shaped end representing community spirit
The Community Flower
The second idea was based on using people to make a flower shape. I sketched the idea out in two ways. The first was to put the peoples heads to the outside, meaning they actually looked like stickmen and a flower. The shape didn’t seem right, so I flipped all the stickmen so that their head made up the center of the flower, where the pollen is stored.
Click to see full-size flowers drawing
Click to see this logo larger
The two issues I had with this logo were:
- Grow are more fruit and veg growers rather than flowers and plants
- The stickmen weren’t clear enough as representing community
To try and tackle the problem, I came up with the two concepts below. After a large amount of thought, I decided to leave the idea and pursue another.
Click to see this version larger
Click to see this logo larger
The Watering Can
My third and final idea was to use a watering can in some way to represent Grow. The idea of water relating the survival of plants and humans was a correlation I had yet to explore. Where there’s water, there’s life. That’s the kind of theory astronauts have been using for decades to search for extra terrestrial life on other planets.
Creating the word grow out of water wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone. The water needed another physical form of some sense or a container that would relate it to plants and humans. The watering can idea hit me after I checked back over my sketches and I began creating a watering can-based logo.
My Grow Watering Can Idea - slightly overpowering!
A more subtle approach but slightly too small! Click to see it bigger
One idea turned out to be too large and the other too small! I was at a loss as how to get the watering can in without making it dominate the beautiful typeface.
I began studying the Typeface I had chosen on Dafont. When I had chosen it, it just felt like the right one and I hadn’t really thought why. The font was called Goudy Bookletter 1911. The lovely serifs had made it possible for me to make the “G” look like it was watering the “R”. There was no reason why the typeface could not hold its own, with a watering can as the background!
I decided that this would be the right idea to continue with indepth. I set about creating the watering can in illustrator. I thought a 3D looking icon would be more of a challenging and look better!
Click to see this stage larger
Click to see stage 2 larger
Click to see stage 3 larger
Click to see stage 4 larger
Click to see stage 5 larger