boakes.org

I’ve been asked to come up with a few designs for a logo that can be used for the Grid2005 workshop. In the brief it was suggested that a sliding block puzzle might be suitable, so without too much hassle I created one.

Prototype 1

The first problem is that it uses capital letters; this is easily remedied, but there is a hornets nest of niggles related to misuse of capitalisation in the word grid which are too tedious to go into here. The main problem was that it locks the sponsors into the logo - and sponsors can change.

The third problem with a sliding block puzzle is that the number of letters has to be jiggled to match the number of available tiles. Adjusting the dimensions gives some leeway but wordlength and readability then become issues.

Prototype 2

For the second prototype I went for a more abstract, traditional, logo. I wanted a very stylised G so as to draw attention away from any capitalisation (or lack of).

Another driver for the second prototype was that I wanted to create something that would work equally well in black on white, as well as in colour, since a really good logo shouldn’t rely on anything more than it’s shape (the McDonalds arches, the IBM lettering, the coca cola swirl, all have colour associoated with them, but they don’t rely on that colour to form the logo itself). The first prototype would not look good in monochrome.

Additionally I was keen to create some reusable components in the logo, for example, the shape made by the loop of the g makes a nice bullet point, and you won’t find the typeface in the shops because it’s a bespoke creation, each letter hand drawn for this logo.

Event Logo History

There have been several previous logos for the event, and they can be seen here.