Brand Identity Design Presentations and Critique - Young Guns EP 10

[Music] what's up everybody if you haven't seen it go check out episode 9 right now here's your mission I want you to pick an airline and create a sub brand that is either a premier VIP or first business class sub brand whatever it is that you want to do we're gonna need to design a logo and this could be a word mark a combination mark or anything that you can think of design ad minimum three applications this could be the cabin menu ticket patterns packaging banners billboards thank you the judging criteria will be based on these following points one appropriateness to flexibility longevity luxury and applications the designers were checking with me mid point in the airline design challenge did anybody drastically altered the direction which they headed in or was it more of the same you get lost in the woods and it happens to all of us I would have presented me more I think you did a lot of good work and you made a lot of progress and now we're ready to see what they came up with Arun what do you have for us [Music] when you've got the assignment my first reaction was to select three Indian Airlines which were spice chair indigo and misstara what I ate was I went on their website looked at what their current about page says about themselves their tagline is fly the new feeling after I selected vistara what I did was I read about everything from the press releases to their about page and from the agency who did their current branding by the name is Tara itself I created a name from it but then after the meeting from Chris it turns out that the name wasn't really good I went back to the drawing board noted down everything how I want the new premium class to feel and then started noting down names accordingly the first few choices were bliss unbiased ara and serenity by the startup vistara has been derived from the Sanskrit word with star which basically means a limitless expanse when you look at the limitless expanse you feel very peaceful very calm and basically you feel serene once I decided the name the next step was to basically find out who would actually use this so I made two user profiles one was a young person who just wants to have any experiences and once or twice a year they go for a vacation other one was someone like a CEO or something who travels frequently and star would definitely target them because they would want them to have that feeling of like you know not having to worry about anything and everything is taken care of now the next step in the process was to basically create style escapes to get a better understanding of the visual language I wanted to have a lot of white space around it and clean-looking visuals not too bold very modern so what I did was first I made a styles kay for a vest Aras current branding itself because I wanted to understand their current visual language next step was to be a term logo instead of creating a completely new mark what I tried to do was take the current logo and derive something from it because the current vistara lubu in itself is old mathematical you know hindu kind of device which denotes the center of the universe all things balanced so what I try to do is I try to trace it and derive something from it ended up creating a blooming Lotus which is related to peace and yoga and meditation so I created that logo and then what I did was I created a double stroke so that kind of looks like the current vistara logo and then I also decided to go with the serif font Baskerville that is a pretty obvious choice because I wanted to also feel very classy and premium I'm pretty happy with the logo design after I was done with that or what I did was I created a style scape for serenity where I tried to make a similar visual languages vistara but a bit different which kind of feels much more upper-class than the current branding having so clean and like you know a lot of white space around that kind of a look so that's what I try to do with the style scape in the visual language that I went with for serenity now that all of the visual pieces were in place the next step was to basically design a few applications to showcase the identity and I decided to go ahead with the boarding pass billboard and envelope which comes with a vanity kit and that one's too bored you get basically with the applications I wanted to focus more on communication and messaging the feeling of not having to worry about while you're traveling if you look at the final visuals final output of the whole branding the whole idea was not to go way off in the current vistara branding and still keep it somewhat of a similar visual language saying pinkish sky cloud that's why I didn't go way off in the color palettes it was basically do not create something very very different or very upper class but just have something VIP okay I'm gonna send a pause here for a second because Arun has come a really long way since the last time in which we saw his work how was little nervous I don't know if you were but he didn't do too much and in a way I wish he got here during the midpoint because I can already see some problems so Arun while you're showing me this style escape of the original brand of the Stara I was like this looks really good so it's really bold it's beautiful and then you showed me what you're doing with serenity first of all I like the name it feels like it fits and without getting too far ahead of myself I think I like where you're going in terms of the general direction but when I look at serenity as a style escape art can already see lots of problems you put a gentleman in here in a business suit he looks a little bit older more mature looks like he travels well and he has good taste and then everything in it does not fit with him it feels very pastel it feels like it could be a wellness spa it feels like it could be a makeup brand it doesn't feel like it fits with the fast are a brand and in meeting what I would expect his style and taste to be like that's the biggest problem right now because even if you executed every piece of identity for your new brand serenity in this exact style I would feel like you may have missed the mark and so there's a part of me that wish that you had done this earlier that you had committed to doing some design work and putting yourself out there so I can give you this kind of feedback well I'm not gonna harp on history we need to move forward so let's dive into the actual design that you did I like the name serenity it sounds good it's easy to say it feels like it's keeping with the brand and the icon that you came up with this lotus blossom I think it's actually a really nice mark and what I like more about it is it feels like you went in and deconstructed the astara symbol which looks like a star I think there's some kind of mathematical interlocking Beauty geometry part to it that I think is really nice and you very carefully deconstruct that and created another object and I think that's a very clever and smart strategy on how you can do a brand extension take something from the original pull some of that DNA out and reconstitute it into something else and I think this is quite nice it doesn't quite have the same interlocking qualities but I think it's a good design it's solid it's simple it's recognizable it's all those things that we look for in a mark I'm gonna get a little nitpicky now I'm gonna dive in and look at your kerning and I think the kerning is a little bit off and I'll show you where now usually you guys I don't want to spend too much time on this because this is one of the most fun day tional skill sets you're gonna have in terms of letter spacing what you look for is the most difficult kerning pairs and then design everything around that and I'll show you right now what I think are the most difficult kerning areas this is gonna be a tricky area because whenever you have a diagonal next to an open space letter like T that's going to be a problem because as tight as you can push that that creates a certain volume the same thing happens with the are the leg of the R and the e you can already see none by me cross hatching through this that there's a lot more space here volume wise not space wise long lines in here and there's a lot of different ways you can think about it you can think about as if you were pouring sand into here and filling up space how much sand did it take up and you can see right now we have a real problem because between the s and E there's very little space and if you step back you can see that you need to push these letters apart those are arrows for pushing them apart okay it feels like the e ar e combination feels really good so then you look at the re N and you go from letter to letter and then that's how you block it out so right now I already can tell you the s needs to be farther out now I think you just said that you picked the typeface Baskerville it's a good classic serif typeface and it has some really nice qualities to it I don't know this might need a little bit of a flourish otherwise it just feels as if you type something in where can you do that perhaps you can take the leg of the are you could drop it down a little bit just a little bit and create a little bit of a customization here just so it feels like it's customized for this now obviously I didn't draw it right because it got too thick but that's what I'm looking for I'm looking for just a little bit of a tweak so that it feels like they can own it you you might also do an initial larger letter like the S making it a little bit taller and the Y that might solve some of your spacing issues as well the vistara sometimes you don't need to make all centered you can make it asymmetrical a balance by shifting it over to the right maybe under in this area right here so maybe you can shift up there and it gets probably still work and fit within that little pocket we're just trying to make a tight of configuration as possible the next thing that I might encourage you to do is to play around with a scale between symbol of the lotus blossom and the word mark itself sometimes when you scale this out to be that wide it might feel a little disproportionate I think I want to focus a little bit more on the lotus flower personally so maybe we can scale it down just gut instinct tells me about 80 percent or so to achieve a little bit of a more balanced lock up okay let's look at the other pieces of your identity the stationery card I think is one of your most successful pieces of design because I like seeing this royal purple a little hint of the gold and the silver look word market you've got however I think the mock-up needs a little work it feels more like a color and it doesn't have that metallic hot foil stamping that I'd like to see in these kinds of things it should have a brilliance to it should Sparkle and should catch my eye but otherwise I think this is a very nice application now if your segi Habib this it looks like a slap on logo you guys know what a slap on logo is you take a logo you slap it on something there isn't anything else that you're doing no I noticed in your style escape you created an interesting pattern or you found a pattern I would have liked to see that in here or perhaps the edge of the card could be a silver or gold so it has a little bit more of a premium quality to it those of you guys that are new to print all these little touches these little printing techniques that you use can add a lot of that premium feel just in the way that it's applied so there's a tip for you now let's take a look at billboard or an ad it's this experience a new feeling serenity now here's the thing you're talking about white space now I understand the reason why a lot of us associate premium with white space but a different term for white space is negative space and why do I make that distinction because it literally does not have to be white some people think having white space or negative space means you have to have white that's not true at all black can be negative space gold can be negative space it just means there's not a lot of activity going on those spaces okay now when I look at this my first impression is it feels like I'm sorry kind of a a mall ad for a massage parlor like you have 15 minutes I'm gonna give you a little back rub that's what it feels like this does not feel like that premium thing that we want it to be why is that there's a couple problems one is the original photography the way that this gentleman's looked the way he styled and art directed the way that the chairs photograph he doesn't look great it looks very much like stock photography and it doesn't have a great style to it next when you comp in the clouds over him he just literally feels like you slapped a layer on top hits screen and Photoshop and called it the day and that's not what we want oftentimes this is how I see ads for travel or Airlines this is what they typically look like and we want to steer away from those typical images I would have preferred if he done something a little bit more surreal or abstract or representative of the feeling of premium class versus literally showing somebody sleeping in the clouds that's no bueno that's not good all right next over here you've got a lot of elements going on for something that's supposed to be about serenity and I think that's because you have too much copy and everything is very similar in size I'll mark this up this is a certain size this they all feel very similar in size and when you talk about negative space you need to break things up or make things a lot smaller so you have room to breathe this is not it you've got three colors you have the deep purple color you have the green and then you have the yellow gold color that's three colors in three chunks of information that is too much my friend and personally I think you would have been better served if you found something that had a little bit more contrast and less of that pastel a color look that's that kind of feminine cosmetic beauty salon vibe that you're going for which is not appropriate for this so I think inappropriateness you might have missed the mark there let's see what else you've done okay in terms of the ticket itself I think this look good there's not a lot of design for me to critique here because basically you put the logo in you you hit it with a bit of color and the rest I think this is something that we've designed or change too much and there's probably limited amounts of what you can do there I would have loved to see again some of that pattern I don't know if we have to repeat this Stara here I think this could have been better if you had a nice pattern some kind of design that was repeating over here that connected it to the other side I think that could have looked really good I don't know what else you could have done here there's not a lot of space for design so probably not the best application to pick so now I'm taking a look at the kit envelope that you would get that welcomes you on board here's a thing you're a young guy I get it it's hard for young people to think about luxury but this definitely does not feel luxurious to me there could have been a sheet of vellum that that lays over this there could have been something that feels more hand done ornate something that feels really custom and this is not whew that way and if you remember with Emily and myself and we're doing emerald we pretty much use all the printing tricks that we could give in an imaginary world we have an infinite budget and we can do whatever we want so we had handwritten notes hot wax seals we had foil stamping we had all kinds of really interesting printing techniques that raises that premium quality this unfortunate isn't feel that way it feels like it was color copied on a card and printed out and that was that the other thing is I'm never a fan of centered type for these kinds of things I think we need to get away from just doing center type it feels a little lazy to be honest it feels too easy and I think there was a golden opportunity no pun intended to use color blocks of color to do something more interesting with the lotus blossom pattern not not feeling it here okay that's it time for me to score how you did okay next up is Sharif now Cherie came out of the gate pretty strong so I have high expectations of where he's going to take this let's take a look at what he's done I think that's with Airlines for this challenge I just remember walking into the airplane and it was very different the cabin was so white and that were tightly packed but they were black leather and had this look about a very different from any flight I've ever taken I wanted to work on this Swiss Airlines brand and create this first-class experience I also wanted to use the Swiss brand that sort of exists in our collective subconscious this very rich heritage and culture I started off this project by running core I did the two first exercises which is like the first is the brand attributes exercise and the second are user profiles it really helped me kind of get in the headspace of where I wanted to take this brand and make sure that I had Satan and roadmap in my mind so I knew what to create the style escapes based on and how to take them further into a visual identity after these two exercises I was able to Inc about a name more clearly because I knew what or which direction I wanted to take the brand I think crimson is a very strong name it aligns with a lot of the attributes I came up with it's a sexy name it's a vivid color it's a strong color it has those royal associations the first escape for me was going to be all about capturing this feeling I had and on the Swiss Airlines light the white cabin the black leather seats a clean very modern very minimal the second style scape I tried to go a little further I researched certain brands based on the user profiles I created like what would these users be using on a daily basis what kind of brands they'd be interacting with I went this sort of more traditional approach to luxury where you have darker tones a deeper greens serif font discussing it with Chris later on gave me definitely the clarity I needed and the confidence to pursue the initial starscape which spoke to me more I started out trying to create a logo playing around with certain elements I started playing around with the cross I moved on to a star a diamond abstract shapes that don't necessarily have to translate into something physical in the real world but the associations have to be positive and have to align with the brands that I have in mind during the second week of design I had the call with Spencer we were discussing how things were going taking each other's opinion on on the work and I showed him the pattern I had going on which I didn't really like and I guess he didn't either he shared his screen with me and he sort of took the logo outlined with duplicated multiple times and had this very simple pattern come come out of it but I really liked it I took the pattern and further refined that basically just removed the diamond shape from the logo and had the circles create the diamond shape themselves and I'm really happy I got the chance to bounce ideas off of him because in the creative process for me at least I always find it very helpful to show your work to other people so my initial sort of instinct was to create this all black sexy boarding pass for the crimson pass which I almost did but then half way I realized that it wouldn't work in real life ticket printer is only print in black in this mono space fun so they have to have white space so I ended up designing the boarding pass accordingly overall I have so much fun working on this challenge it's definitely the most fun I've had in the young guns so far it was very challenging I never thought I'd work on an airline identity project before but it was very interesting for me this is the first project I ever designed for applications because I knew I had to create mock-ups and I knew I had to apply the my design at the end of the day so I was really really very conscious of how it was going to be applied and sometimes I even designed on the mock-up itself makes you more connected to what's also the outcome in the end and takes you away from this you know you're just working on a screen all the time and you're disconnected from what the design will be at the end of the day whoo all right Sheree you've done a really good job I like how far you've gone with this and the just the thoroughness of your thinking and your design exploration I can tell you're a little bit more of a seasoned designer than some of our young guns okay this is evident in the work that you do and the thoroughness of your thinking okay so now let's pull this up here can take a look at the ticket I really like seeing how you color corrected and swapped out the passport so it looks like a Swiss Passport I think it was really smart how you color corrected this photo to make it look like a Swiss passport it really completes the image and this is a great shot so a lot of times just choosing the right photograph to use is everything and I can believe that in the back there it's a Swiss Air airplane I don't know I can't tell but it feels really good the art direction on this the guy with a blue suit in his hand and a fancy watch I presume holding the passport really completes it even though the only part you really truly designed is the ticket itself now I want talk about the ticket for a second here I like seeing the ticket in context versus just seeing the ticket by itself and the reason why I like that is because there's a nice hit of color and you're thinking through how does this design live in the real world versus just on my screen and I think that's a really smart thing so that's a good tip for all you guys that are paying attention try to show your design in context and how somebody's going to use it so you can properly evaluate it and make considerations the the thing that I noticed though is in the flat design the layout the red wasn't as deep and saturated as what I'm used to seeing for Swiss air and I think that's really important that you get that really bright dark rich red and this one feels a little bit lighter on the spectrum so let's make sure that we're making it color accurate there because it looked a little light and also the blue I think could use a little saturation to make it pop a little bit I liked how you resolve the pattern and this is a great example of using your colors and your patterns to make a more interesting ticket without complicating the design of the ticket self so good job on that let's take a look at some other images next up the luggage tag I like this application this shows you that the mark if it's strong and it's designed well can be separated as a component that is a quick identifier and I like this layout quite a lot you have a hit of the blue I think I see a little bit of a pattern in there it's very light and then the tag itself beautifully done great application I love this part so you you really have pulled out all the stops going into the uniform itself and kind of indicating certain things I'm not sure if this is a mock-up or whatever but it looks really good and it shows that you're thinking through the entire design even from the stitching of the cuff itself I like that there's a little bit of a white embroidered thing on the sleeve and I like all these little touches and usually when you do these kind of monogrammed sleeves it can get a little crazy you can get a little cheesy but just doing why don't--why doing it very subtly so you can barely see it I think is a really nice and classy touch befitting a premium class okay looking at the scarf and I think the scarf is really nice that you have the color palette integrated and just a little identifier to call attention to it again very tastefully done if somebody wasn't totally focused on that they might not even notice but I liked it liked it a lot so many applications even in your menu design I noticed that when you were showing us your process you color corrected things you swapped out certain parts and the little tissue or the fabric that's the headrest protector has the emblem in it I like that I like the repeating patterns and the colors and the art direction of this shot it looks really good feels very premium to me the last piece I'm going to critique is the crimson billboard okay this is one of those ones where I think you're on the right track I like that you're using the cross as a focal device to help our eye concentrate on that person but I think making it pure white I think if you had just played around with transparency making it feel like it was a spot varnish or some kind of clear translucent things so it wasn't so overpowering I think that could have been a really good look it could have been really nice if you made it feel like it was etched from glass so that we're seeing through it so there's a little bit of diffraction of the image underneath just so it doesn't feel like a slap on mark otherwise I think this is really nice there's a little mouse I bond here which I don't think you need for billboard typically when you look at a billboard you don't have a few seconds to read it so all that legal mumbo-jumbo at the bottom we don't need don't do it you don't need it and then the last thing is be the new face of Swiss luxury probably needs to be one and a half to two times bigger than that because it's very difficult to read especially where you place it a lot of complex things going on you could have done a selective focus thing where you blurred out parts of the image and darkened a little bit that would have aided the legibility of it okay I see that you darkened a little bit but we need to go a little bit further other than that I think you did a great job it's time for me now to score let me know if you agree with my critique of what sharif has done in the comments below okay next up is Sean Campbell who also came out pretty strong out of the gate he's a very young designer and I gave him a hard time about working and pumping gas at the gas station but I think this young person has a career in design ahead of them let's see what he came up with the other choice from my project is American Airlines I chose American because while I was doing my research I noticed that they don't already have a well fleshed out separately branded first-class service that some other airlines have one sites like dribbble will be Han school is the grand stuff like that and I just searched a bunch of keywords I thought might be relevant I gathered a bunch of images and then later I went back and curated them even further and grouped them into different mood boards and I use those mood boards to base two stocks games from the first thoughts I kept I created was very modern very vivid colors bright red bright blue and then the second direction was more reserved with some less saturated colors darker overall I introduced a goal to kind of make it feel a little bit more premium and then Chris helped me to eliminate that choice I think the first loss people is a lot stronger anyway from that I just refined the dostala' scape with some feedback that Chris gave me and then that was the final escape that I worked off of I came up with a name pretty early on during the process and the name I chose is ace I think is a good name for a couple reasons first of all the word ace itself the adjective form at least means of high quality or rank since I'm branding a premium service here I think that fits perfectly also I'm sure you've heard the term a spotter before also board a slash with an A which is important for Americans naming scheme that they have going on with a couple of the different sub brands that they already have such as advantage spelled with two A's which is their rewards but I think once the style scape was set in place I was comfortable to move forward and start working on the logo and so I bust out the sketchbook and I just started playing with forms I knew that the logo was gonna deliver Marco's gonna be based off of some sort of stripe for him because I wanted to use that as a motif throughout the branding as I established in the style scape and so I started playing with some some striped forms like that and eventually I came to something that I liked it was a concept that really stood out to me and so I just took that into illustrator ended up like said eight with fruitier with some tight tracking and that was a logo don't need the actual design process the first thing I think it's that bad was boarding pass I came up with this design that was using a pattern that created based off of again the graphic off the American carriers I just wasn't happy with how it looked and I just thought it was going in the wrong direction so I went back to the drawing board I started playing with the logo and seeing how I can extrapolate it and maybe make some sort of pattern out of it next exactly what I did I started playing around with an ad design and came up something I really liked I used the same kind of principles and tried doing the the boarding pass again I was happy with how it came out so once that was kind of set in plates doing the restaurant stationery was a breeze overall the project was a lot of fun to work on and satisfied with the end result there are some flaws and some things out change so I do plan to continue working on it and flush it out some more to put in my portfolio I think I did a bad job of showing the identity fitting within Americans already exist in branding and I also definitely have to work on my presenting skills I realized like major Wow Sean I'm just blown away I got a say for a person of your age and the sophistication of your design your aesthetic and how deep you went into this project you know what it tells me you have fun doing this and this is really important a lot of you guys were working on your projects and you kind of got stuck who do you have to blame for that whoever picked that company to work on that's who you got to blame and that person is looking at you right back in the mirror so here it's challenging to work on such an economy and as American Airlines the original design was created by Massimo big Nellie legendary designer and then later on redesigned so you've got some big shoes to fill what are you gonna do with this and now I see what you've done I think it's brilliant I'm going through this and I'm just blown away at how good you are forget about your age and forget about what's cool or if you even went to school how good you are man there's some really raw deep talented person inside of you that's waiting to scream and break free of whatever it is that you're doing I encourage you to continue down this path now let's get into it now that I don't had all the superlatives alright okay look at this my gosh what you did with the tickets the front and the back creating a pattern and mixing it around and using different colors and showing the gradients I see a system in here and the system looks really great now chances are you will not get away with the ticket like this because there probably is a lot more type that you have to incorporate but I'm not going to nitpick here I think the design is beautiful and look how you're thinking through it just a simple barcode and maybe your seat number and that's all you really need at that point and when you tear it apart you have that really nice color blocking pattern that you have on the back which really connects it to the design overall when you showed me your process of designing the a it's very simple and if there's a reference to the current design but abstract enough so that it feels related but it's not derivative of the original mark and I like that and that's a very tricky thing to do to feel like we share DNA but it doesn't feel like you simply simply copy and something in really good job there man I'm just blown away even this one layout is good I like the pattern maybe you've been paying attention to what Emily's been doing just maybe okay I like all the different applications that you made next to the kiosks and you can see a giant wallpaper so your design works small and it works really big in scale and people love seeing that clients are up wow I can see that this is going to last us a long time so in terms of longevity you definitely paint a very clear picture that this is going to work as a system and that's really important to do I also like how you've handled the priority baggage drop and check in for the kiosks at American Airlines ace like it feels really well thought out I like seeing all these applications it's really neat how you're able to design assigned so many different applications probably my favorite of your applications though it's a toss-up between the ticket and the menu whoo this looks so good I like that you designed the napkins and the plate and how you put it all together in this mock-up it looks really good I also liked the skinny format this skyscraper format so it's not a square blocky thing and it's folded in half probably you don't need a saddle stitch this thing because the menus are not really that deep that you have multiple pages and that's just a little technical term for the stapled part now let me get into the menu you mentioned that you use fruit etre as your typeface and it's really nicely cleanly typeset here now if I were just there you gonna sit down with you a little bit Sean what I would tell you do is tighten up you're letting the letting as you guys know is the spacing between lines and I think this just needs to be a little tighter because what I what's happening right now is I'm starting to feel the air that's going through and I start to read the negative space between the lines so I like the contrast between the bold fruit odor and the regular or light four degree I just want the body part the a downs New York Strip to be tighter together okay otherwise I think it's a really good design now I saw in your deck I mean you even did a presentation deck how above and beyond do you want to go there are there are points for like bonus things brownie points I don't know but you've gone above and beyond on a love that you're thinking towards the future I is going to be a strong piece for your portfolio but I saw little strips of transparency in your deck somewhere I would have liked to see some of that so that could be done with a spot varnish so it's not too over the top so you have a little bit of a dull and shiny finish and I like that okay I also like your business card your business card is excellent I like the typeset it looks really good I like the bold color I like the deconstructed components of the logo again we need to tighten up the letting here just tighten it up don't feel like you have to take up so much space I think it would look much better if it just took a bat much space and next is the alignment with your name I think we need to refine this a little bit it just feels like that was thrown in there and let's just go with the rule don't use too many different point sizes too too many different weights and I think you don't need to if you just made that the same point size and line it up with that over there I think it would been fantastic dare I say if somebody were to look at this with a little bit of tweak in your typography it would not even be able to tell if you had just finished corporate at any design at Art Center or if you were some kid from the East Coast good job my man you even did the bus boards look at that you wrote some copy soar like an eagle very nice design I like it good mock-up really well done nice saturated so one of the things that I want to point out here isn't in this mock-up you use a very saturated contrast the image which supports the saturated contrast the poster that you design if you picked something that was very golden and retro looking your your billboard or your bus board will look very far into it so it's nice that you integrated those two things now there's a good chance that you color corrected this I don't know if you did kudos to you for for realizing that and having the instincts to do that my least favorite part of your identity is the personalized envelope I think we're missing a lot of opportunities to do something really cool and interesting fun and different because this literally is something that's handed out to passengers in the ACE Club and I think we could have done something with the envelope instead of just being a bread envelope we could have had some design components we could have parts of the let er connect with the envelope itself what do I mean by that let me try and draw this see what happens here so if I have the envelope like this as you draw out the components so let's say this is the card right before you pull it out it says hi right maybe there's a design element that crosses over and connects the inside and out so when you pull it out it's two parts to a puzzle I think you could have definitely played around with some of the patterns that you've generated thus far and again the typesetting feels a little antiquated it feels a little bit too slapped on being very centered this is the weakest part of your identity system I want to make one last little comment and I saw that in your design process in drawing the mark for American Airlines ace Club that there was a moment in there where you designed the mark and this the blue strip was down here and I thought that looked better to me because it felt like an abstracted a where this offset just feels like two elements versus an A and it's a very minor thing but I think if you looked at it see look at that again and see if it improves and if you like it better do that instead for your portfolio okay let me know how I did was that going too easy on Sean or ones they're not praising him enough okay next up we have Spencer the youngest of the young guns he got off to a rough start he was hesitant in his design so let's see what he came up with the airlin i picked is Lufthansa because they're German airline so I can kind of stretch outside of my comfort zone do something I've done before because I do not know an ounce of German but also because I think the existing identity system is really strong and I felt that they had a lot of elements that could be expanded upon and played on so my initial approach when trying to come up with a name was to kind of deconstruct the name Lufthansa and then kind of find variants of it I was playing around with German forever until I stumble across the word nest and nest I didn't think of anything at first but you know it is kind of tangent related to you know the larger picture of cranes and the birds and the flying in general and I ended up picking this one because of its relation to it too because of its qualities that it kind of brings to mind I think when I think of nest I think of you know family and a warmth and comfort nest is a word that works in both English and German it spelled the same pronounced the same you know same meaning so I thought like really with the triple whammy and just you know go ahead and do that one a lot of thinking next version kind of went into understanding how this smaller brand had to fit into the larger brand so the feather mark was actually pulled just right from the call with Chris I think he just slipped it in as a slight suggestion and as I went along the process it it actually seemed more and more the right fit it was a matter of really what was the style of the feather going to look like was it gonna feel more organic or was it going to be a more machine I'm kind of you know what were the visual traits that would tie it into the larger brand I ended up picking the mark that I did because I felt that it was a good neutral mark that the brand growing to over time rather than it's saying a whole lot I'm explicitly the the logo I made was actually created from just repurposing parts of the Lufthansa logo I kind of just took the head of that crane and use that on its side and kind of use that as a foundation to kind of build my mark upon these things help draw connection between the two brands so as far as color goes I actually just held on to the blue that Lufthansa uses but I kind of expanded the palette to kind of add a lot more of these vibrant hues so after I had the name and the idea that's when I started to kind of throw things together and start to build a style scape which really helped me narrow my focus about what this brand was going to look like and helped me not only in the visual development of it and what the identity was going to feel like but also in what the brand essence was going to feel like with the larger picture of the brand Allah because Lufthansa uses a vodka I figured I would try to use something you know fancier kind of you know spice up the higher-end brand I ended up going with Dido and I thought Dido was a really good choice because it does you know kind of have that you know modernist Sarah very fancy and elegant or but I also used it because I think that Dido actually shares a lot of you know skeletal similarities to Elle vodka the mock-ups were something that I ended up investing a lot of time into because there's not a whole lot of airport signage mock-ups out there I kind of had to you know reconfigure other ones and really get creative with the ways that I were to create these things to conclude I think that this whole project was a lot harder than I originally anticipated but it's great because I learned a lot had a lot of fun a long way and in hindsight there's a lot of things I probably would have done differently but I think that I'm just just grateful to have had the opportunity and to be able to learn like this some things I think I learned for next time is always come prepared and that like presentation is everything all right Wow okay Spencer first off I am relieved that you were able to take it this far I liked how you presented your thinking and I want to make a point of it first when you show this evolution of the existing bird and making it evolve into the feather I think that's super smart because it's often very difficult for existing brands to see the connection between where they are the legacy and equity they've built and where you're taking them and showing them in this very thorough logical step-by-step process you're taking them through so it doesn't seem as foreign to them it comes from something I think you did a really good job I think it's the Paul Ryan would be proud of you cuz this is how he would present his logos so I think you really listen to the feedback instead of just taking the existing mark and cropping it and not doing that much with it I think you were freed from that liberated from it when you started to explore other things that can tie in with a parent brand but not be so slavishly deferential to it and I think that's the balance that you're trying to find so good job young man now I'm gonna jump into the logo here now you mentioned in your video that you chose Dido as a typeface normally I would say bravo Bravo excellent typeface love it would use it for lots of different things it does feel quite foreign to Lufthansa hopefully I'm saying that correctly now first of all I want to say good name good choice their nest I like it I get it a bird and nest welcome back to the nest it kind of feels very comforting protected feels good okay here's a little problem I think it feels so foreign to German design booth Anza it's like and Dido just don't seem to want to dance together it's too delicate it's too fine and I think you're potentially missing out on a great opportunity here and I'm gonna show you what I mean I'm gonna get into it okay I think what you could have done is use the feather idea exactly the way you've drawn it but integrate it with a more abstract symbol and then just to use Helvetica and say nest by Lufthansa in the same line same weight everything's the same so let's focus on creating a nice symbol for this premium class so what I'm thinking about is the letter n so this is what I'll do so every time I design something as a symbol or even a logo type I'll draw out with what a capital letter looks like and usually it looks something like this right usually that'll give me some ideas and if I can think of what's another way of drawing an well if I did a seraph and look a little different but not terribly different it looks something like that maybe yeah maybe you look like that I don't know so I'm looking at that then this is where you kind of let your creativity flow a little bit if you look at the letter M it's really two shapes a triangle shape and a rectangle shape now those are the guys that are paying attention don't get ahead of me cuz you know where I'm going with this so if I were to fill this in let me move this over a little bit that can be seen as a letter n you can also see the letter n are things like this where you have a little vertical shape and a semicircle so it's a curved top and a bottom and you can just keep exploring that and people will recognize this for what it is again I'll keep exploring this shape also could be the letter n and so I'm just trying to do something with Ness now now that I spent that much time on this but I think if you were to use a simple shape like this and you incorporated the feather right into it I think your design would be done I'm just gonna roughly draw it the way you've drawn it here and I think that angles are like this now the proportions aren't quite right but I think you get the idea if you play it around with this maybe the scale is a little off maybe the feather is here I think the feather needs a bit a little bit bigger next to the triangle and so if you created a shape I will lock up like that I think then all you need to do is take the word nest to do it by Sansa you would be done I think that's the way to go if you had just done that I think focus on simple geometric shapes use the feather as an element that ties it back into the parent brand and you're going to be golden okay now let's go back to your other applications the one that I'm blown away by the most is this one is your 3d extruded metal letter form this looks so convincing that I just can't believe it's Photoshop I like I can't believe it's butter it's amazing good job on this so whatever you did to make this use these kinds of comping skills in the future for your mock-ups it looks very convincing the metallic finish the reflections the 3d extrusion the beveled edges well well done awesome job probably the best mock-up that we've seen thus far now not to discredit anything that Connors gonna come up with but thus far it's probably the best-looking mock-up okay I really like to sign this sign is very smart it's modern I can see you trying to integrate the outline and the feather in here I just don't think you need it I think if you got rid of that because that part feels fussy to me and think about how to design this bold icon letter N and I think this looks really good so your typography choice here in simplicity and color palette and the contrast between the two with a little hit of accent red make it feel really good I like it well done and I also like your billboard the billboard application integrates a diagonal element a graphic element that mirrors the same angle as the feather of the nest smartly played there's a pattern in here I saw you designing in your video I'm not quite sure how that ties in with anything beside it being an abstract pattern and that's okay if it doesn't tie in but really I think that's what we need to work on now again here we need to do some art direction with photography because this looks like a really old photo it needs to be art directed a little bit better the lifestyle that you cook you're going after let's work on that okay okay for my initial kind of knee-jerk reaction probably one of the most improved of all the young guns from where you started kind of very tentative and where you were going to go with your design not committing to anything to kind of seeing it like this I think you've done a great job I hope you had fun I saw that you admitted that this was harder than you thought yes designing a airline identity system is very difficult and that's why very few companies do it and they get a big bucks so if you want to make the big bucks aim high let me know if you guys think my suggestion with abstracting the letter N and integrating with the feather was the way to go and sidestepping the choice of Dido or serif typeface to begin with do you agree with me or do you think he should stick with the weight he's designed it currently let me know in the comments below okay last but not least and heading into the homestretch to anchor this challenge is Conner Fowler really looking forward to seeing what he's doing because last time we spoke he was very confident he knows what he wants to do sometimes it's like you know what you want to do just go for it let's see what he's done I picked an airline called jet to jet to is a budget airline in the UK in the UK a lot of the top airlines are budget airlines I knew the jet too specifically didn't have any kind of VIP or luxury section their branding system was quite new it was quite fresh and it seemed very simplistic in its application I wanted to stick to something that I knew I could start from the ground up rather than having to kind of finesse my way around lots of different sections of other airlines I began by gathering lots of jet who related images so that was things like photography it was the inside of cabins it was there and what they look like when they go to events and corporate things what the planes looked like any kind of merchandise I could find I couldn't find any kind of brand guidelines or brand rules or any kind of in-depth about page so I had to build it up through the photography that they had online and I could pull off Pinterest after I'd dug a little deeper into the jet - branding itself I decided to dig up loads of images of what actual luxury Airlines looked like I started to come across a lot more vintage photography so we're talking flights from the like 50s 60s 70s when first-class and business-class was kind of introduced or luxury flying and some of the things that would come up would be a bit ridiculous as you can see from the sketches what I'm doing is doing very very rough layouts and general shaping to block it out almost website wireframe style just very rough and then we're going in and gridding up the tag itself and building out that way so having spoken to Chris and taking on all of his feedback with the final present a and what I am to do is take the customer focus the direction of jet to and make sure that is continued through to jet to VIP so for the creation stage of the jet to project I first focused on the logo design itself making sure that the Helvetica typeface and the custom letters that we did fitted with a system that jet to already had then it was moving on to the color palette so I can make something that was contrasting enough to what they already had but also worked as a cohesive system so I started out by inverting the red going for kind of a blue ice tone instead of the red fiery tone and then built that out of it further because it wasn't quite right then the tags themselves and the items that I picked so the airline tag the pin and a cabin menu and needed to find the balance between super premium and like first-class kind of metallic letterpress all that type of stuff and something that goes one step above kind of your very economy-class rough paper print out with a printer that has no ink in it I really enjoyed the project as a whole it was difficult at the beginning to kind of go well which airline do I want to go with how much research don't want to pick at the start before picking an airline or do I just pick one and go for it the trickier bits came in when we were picking words for the name of it I could have gone with something like jet to luxury or jet to premium or any other types of words and as Chris said in his feedback I could have gone project to X but in the UK and Europe we largely don't say to X you say to x and if it was called jet to x that's like two timing so I definitely can't pick that because that has really bad connotations but those little challenges and little ideas all the way through the project kept cropping up so that whether the designs style wasn't heavily influenced by it what the messaging that came along with the branding overall was what I found most challenging was finding something that was a good balance of what jet 2 already had and what they could achieve in the future ok now that we've heard his presentation I've got lots of different reactions here let's see if you guys agree with the way I'm going to feel about this and my own reaction to this it seems like Connor has built up a very strong defense to why he wants to do what he wants to do and that's totally Cape oftentimes when I was teaching over the last 15 years at Art Center you would come into encounter with two or three different types of students there's a type of student that's open that's a sponge I wants to try everything and follow the teacher along the way and then there's a student that says you know what I know what I'm doing I know what's good for me my career my portfolio and I would do what I need to do and then there's some students in between Connor definitely the way he speaks and holds himself a lot of confidence and he's very strong-minded strong-willed so I'm not gonna try to tame that wild stallion let it run and now we get to see the fruits of his labor and he ran wild all over the place now I'm a little confused I'm a little confused because you were given the opportunity to design a premium class airline and what you've done instead is to choose an airline that's super budget so you have to find your own brief in a way that's very limiting I personally would have embraced this and picked an airline where I can go hog-wild and do all the kinds of tricks now maybe strategically if I'm getting into the mind of Connor Fowler strategically you're saying everybody's gonna Zig guess what I'm gonna zag you they can go upgrade and I'm gonna go down great because it really hampers what you can do and we want to make sure that your thinking is really consistent across the board so if you say this is really isn't a luxury class it's just premium economy which just is marketing speak to sell you a slightly more expensive seat and I hate premium economy either put me in economy put me in business class but not in between because it sucks it's no way it's a fake way premium economy those two words don't even belong together it's like jumbo shrimp this is where you need to be really clear because you're saying to the world and deliberately making this look kind of low-rent I think that's good if you can consistently follow through what I find a little bit odd is in your design you've removed the jet from the logo but you put the jet everywhere else so how does this work with a parent brain it almost feels like it's the same but different just to be different now get this part Massimo McNally did a great job of just using Helvetica and we've seen other designers use Helvetica and just keep everything super simple very minimal but somehow still achieve that high-end feel and you could have done that by being very disciplined with your color choices and reproduction you could have just picked one color either black or white or blue and white get rid of the gradient saying we don't need extra colors we're gonna keep it really simple I'm going to use one typeface and keep everything bold and somewhat generic now if you're a fan of art if you've seen any of Damien hearses installations and his artwork he uses a lot of pharmaceutical packaging as his inspiration he changes the scale he crops things differently and he limits the color palette but it looks really beautiful I think that would have been a great way for you to go to look at very utilitarian design for things like shipping containers packaging what they put on trains cereal boxes just on the bottom of things where you're not nobody's paying attention I love that kind of utilitarian design it's really bold lines and really simple graphics I think that would have been a great way to do this and I think you touch on that you dip your toe in there especially with this tag where's my pen let me change the color here especially with this tag for Amsterdam I think that's a close take on it and I think this one's a close take on it where you have type just kind of utilitarian broken apart I I get your inspiration and I think here's where you need to play around on the design a little bit maybe scale some things down and achieve that balance because otherwise it doesn't feel designed and I get it I know that's the look you're going for it's kind of undesigned design as if nobody designed it but it's very hard to pull that off and make it look like you know what you're doing so I'm not sure this was entirely successful I applaud you for being as confident as bold as you are with what it is you want to do I just think you fell a little short because it feels like you're stuck in no-man's land you're threading that needle now in the presentation you showed us a tag that looked like it was made of paper and then this extra Ottoman tation the twine that was tied to the luggage which throws me off because that's like really old and retro versus purely utilitarian that's like decorative whereas you want to be so this is where I think you need to be very clear at defining the visual language that you're taking from the moment you say go you know looking at your dinner menu it's like it's very simple it's hard to make things very simple look good and that's why not very many people are successful I think you've done a serviceable job here I'm gonna just point out a few things okay I think you could have easily taken the dinner menu instead of making it centered on the page justify it there so that it aligns up with the rest of the menu and possibly otherwise I think that's good I'm not sure what this blue border is that feels fussy to me is that just the background or is there literally a blue border that's not even across the board that's a little confusing to me so when you present something like this just be more mindful and I understand why you did this because it's a white card on a white background so you created a blue background here and that's why you did it like this so putting in a blue border like this really is just throwing me off a little bit I just think that's a little presentation tip not a deal-killer but something you want to be mindful of okay I'm also noticing the Blues that you're using or inconsistent the mock up looks a lot deeper and darker and matte where the blue on the right side here is very vibrant and saturated so be mindful of that I see that you're using the airplane icon which is deconstructed from the original jet to logo but the way you're using it here is is you're going maximal versus minimal and I just I'm wondering why you mentioned before like retro image and graphics I'm not sure what happened to that idea or direction I think that would have been a good time to use it see now here's the problem as you're trying to make a pin for the for the airline you realize you don't have a great icon to work with it's just a word mark and so then you use the airplane itself to be a base to hold the word mark and see this is where I think some of the trappings of your design are going to come back to bite you in the butt and I'm seeing it here I think that's all I got for you hey guys let me know what you think did Connor do the right thing should you stick to your guns and say this is what I want to do or should you be more open to input and what's the point of all of this anyways if you're gonna have to listen to somebody else and do a self initiated project so on the one hand I applaud him for doing what he wants to do but really risky first show like this we're gonna get critiqued by a guy like me let me know if you agree or disagree comment below whoa that was a lot of ground to cover in a very short amount of time I'm exhausted talking about this but hopefully you're feeling a little different you're feeling invigorated because you're getting to hear how it create a professional like myself with critique work hopefully I've given you some tips and advice on how to present how to build mock-ups and how to improve your design if you want to feel free to participate in the airline design challenge yourself so without further ado after tallying up the scores through much deliberation came down to the wire but here's who won the airline design challenge congratulations if you're intrigued by some of the things that we talked about on this episode and you want a deeper dive and you will want to get a little bit more confident with what you're doing and learn some new tools and techniques and fundamentals be sure to look up our logo design fundamentals course as well as our typography course and last but not least our brand spanking new style escape course

Channel: The Futur

Views: 171,466

Rating: 4.9637775 out of 5

Keywords: the futur, chris do, business of design, brand identity, brand design, branding, branding process, learn branding, graphic design, brand identity design, brand, design a brand, logo design, identity design, branding and identity, visual identity, brand identity design process, branding identity, visual identity design, young guns, design challenge, airline design challenge

Id: P5cqMtqTNog

Length: 61min 12sec (3672 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2019