07 / 10 / 15
Our task was to redesign, in groups, the logotype of a given sponsor of Leeds United Football Club.
We got given Help-Link, a prominent central heating firm based in Leeds and our initial thoughts were to spec out the business and its competitors.
Launched in 1998 from a small Yorkshire town, Help Link has now grown into a leading UK boiler provider. They hold specific values and focus on what matters to their customers. They strive for affordability, professionalism and quality of service. They strive for energy efficiency.
The Help Link logo is simple and follows many gas, boiler and energy provider logo trends; simple text with a small symbol design. Often this design depicts a gas flame, which is generically blue. This type of logo works well and looks polished. It is simple but still effective and makes the company look professional.
We drew together our initial ideas as a group on a big sheet to plan out some of the possible routes we could take...
From this we started to think about how we can use the words in the brand name to communicate different messages to the target audience, and also how we could take inspiration from the visual characteristics of a blocky, white boiler and apply to a type face.
07 / 10 / 15
The brief restricted us to choosing one of Vignelli's 6 basic typefaces and all of our group were immediately draw to the sans-serif, more modern style Helvetica and Verdana. We began comparing the two typefaces looking at the subtilise, but also how context influences the logo on a whole, and examples of the types that are already in industry. From this study and other experimentations carried out on Illustrator we decided to settle on Helvetica, due to its more modern and simplistic feel and we thought it would fit the context of our logo more efficiently.
08 / 10 / 15
Our next step in our design process was to each go away over night and individually work on our own ideas for the project, then we come back and bring all our ideas together to start building the bigger picture. I began to experiment with my designs on paper..
My initial thought processes involved focusing on the HELP and link as individuals, playing with the tracking and boldness on each of them and then bringing them together. The 'HELP' is in caps and bold to catch attention and exaggerate the service being offered; and then the 'link' is normal but kerned together to communicate the interlocking link between customer and the brand.
This idea brought me onto experimenting with actual chain links, until I realised I was swaying away from the brief of it being a logotype.
So instead I tried to think of how I could incorporate the link within the letterform (as shown above).
I still wasn't satisfied with my designs so started fresh revisiting our initial idea of focusing on the visual appearance of a boiler - blocky and white, which resulted in me designing the H and L around a 3Dimensional block. I liked where this was going so took my designs into Illustrator and was able to take these designs back to the group...
Members from my group came back with various responses, including designs which interlocked letters from each word and also a lot of experimentation with how we can communicate colour through the logotype. We identified that other gas companies were fond of using blues and greens in their logos, so Joe had tried to do the opposite and communicate warmth and comfort with an orange glow, and this became an idea that our team wanted to incorporate somehow.
After reflecting all of our designs we ended up with these two last options. We made use of the structure from my HL design and incorporated the orange into it. The type beneath was influenced by Katie's experiments with kerning and the idea of interlocking.
09 / 10 / 15
In the end we decided on using both orange and blue to ensure we had the variance for when the logo was to sit on the website, etc (displayed below)
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