OUGD504 - Brief 02 - Study Task 02 - Establishing Logo Design Requirements

Logo design requirements to define:

1. Find a suitable Kickstarter project

2. Research your chosen organisation thoroughly

3. Write down the key requirements for your logo

Consider: colour, audience, client needs, context, reproducibility, etc.

During today’s study task, I spent most of the 

session looking through the Kickstart website trying to find a start up project that I found interesting enough to design a new logo. Admittedly, I spent a little more time than I should have done searching for an appropriate project, but in the early part of the afternoon session I managed to settle on one. I began by looking through the art, photography and film sections, as these are areas that I am most interested in. However I found it quite difficult to find anything that really needed 'branding', or anything I could relate to on a personal level. The next section I looked at was the food section, the second biggest passion in my life after graphics of course. Here I came across food product start ups, food event spaces, restaurant, community food resources and farms. All the projects in this section were quite exciting, but one caught my eye.

I came across a start up project entitled 'Black Sheep Farm'. The first thing I noticed was that it had received no backing from anyone on the website which I found a bit odd. It seems like a respectable cause and something that I am quite interested in, I'm still confused as to why no one has backed the project. It still has a good two weeks left so it might pick up some backing soon. As I read the project description I realised that the project manager, Tim Adams was using Kickstart to literally get his project off the ground. There was no clear link to a website and no apparent branding or logo design currently in place, just a stock image of two black sheep. I instantly saw this as an opportunity. I got excited over this because this project has no current branding, which means if I approach Tim myself with my designs, he may well use them for his brand identity in the future. This will be a great learning curve for me as a student of design as it would provide me with a first hand insight into client based graphic design practice. 

Background information about 'Black Sheep Farm':

Black sheep farm is proposed to be a new sustainable farm raising sheep, chicken and pigs on pasture for a happier animals and better quality meat and eggs.

After previously raising chickens for both meat and eggs, Tim Adams and his wife are in the process of opening a farm in Essex. 

They plan on raising sheep, chickens and pigs for good, tasty and healthy meat/eggs. They envision an 'open farm' policy so customers can physically visit the farm to see how happy and healthy the animals are.

The couple will be using the funds raised on Kickstarter to unlock grants from the UK Government to finish of raising the funds needed to actually start developing the land and get the farm up and running.

Risks and challenges

As with any farm, the weather is a challenge. However Tim plans on raising livestock, so in theory, adverse weather conditions shouldn't hinder the growth of the animals too much. They will be checking all livestock at least three times a day and more often in bad weather to see if they need moving to a different part of the farm or into a barn if the weather is really wet/cold.

Key Requirement for the Logo:

From reading the project description on Kickstart I get the impression that the farm is going to be quite small in nature and have a unique feel to it if construction goes ahead. It will probably feel traditional, rustic and slower than say a commercial farm. Therefore its branding will need to reflect these specific qualities. The focus of the farm will be producing premium quality products, so this must also be reflected in the branding/logo design. 

The way I see myself achieving this is through the use of hand rendered type and illustration, or using digital techniques that reflect/mimic a certain hand rendered quality. I feel using analogue techniques will allow my logo design to stay true to the farms desired image.

The logo should most likely include some sort of visual reference to sheep as the name of the project has the word sheep in it. I will look into perhaps manipulating type to represent a sheep or something along those lines.

I am still undecided whether or not to use colour in the logo design, or whether to keep it monochrome to suit the context of the brand.Colour may confuse or distract from the brand name. Monochrome logos are also a lot easy to reproduce for print and digital media. 

The farm will be producing premium products including meat, milk and eggs. The farm's ethos is focused on rearing happy animals and producing better quality food products. I expect that the immediate local population will be the main consumers of the products, therefore the logo must appeal to this audience group. 

The logo would be used on a number of collateral products, both print and web based, I need to bare that in mind whilst designing.