With this project, I started by deciding my publishing company’s name. I chose “Ink” because I thought that there was a great potential for lots of different and engaging logo designs. After choosing the name, I immediately began sketching. I started thinking along the lines of a quill writing in ink, so my initial sketches involved lots of feathers, but then I landed on the idea of an ink splatter and that dominated the rest of my sketching process, which is visible on pages 7 and 8 of my brand guide to the left. I think that the sketching part, both on paper and in Adobe Illustrator, was the most fun part of this project. I enjoyed being able to physically sketch my ideas out, and also asking my friends and family for feedback on what they thought about different versions of my logo.
The hardest part of this project for me was writing the mission statement for Ink Publishing as a brand. I thought that choosing a brand voice was not too challenging considering we went over it extensively in class, but I thought that writing a mission statement for an entirely fictional company based on just a logo and brand voice was quite difficult. It took me lots of rewriting and revising to land on a mission statement that I was satisfied with. I also found it difficult to design the brand guide devoid of color. Because my logo was black, and other iterations were black and white, I felt that those were the only two colors I could incorporate in the brand guide. However, I think that in the future I would put more color in the design of my guide because even though my logo didn’t have color, that doesn’t mean that the brand can’t have more colors included in its identity.
Overall, I enjoyed this project because I loved the logo designing process, and I think the experience was valuable for any future case where I might be allowed to design a logo for a group/brand, fictional or not. In the future, I think that I could improve my mission-statement-writing skills, as well as possibly incorporate more color into my brand guide.