Logo Design for J Smith Marine Consultancy Ltd
J Smith Marine Consultancy Ltd is owned by a very nice fellow, John Smith up in Scotland. One day, I checked my voice-mail and heard quite a confusing message from John. He knew what kind of logo design he wanted, but was finding hard to explain.
With a pen and paper in-hand, I rung John back and after informal greetings, I asked him to further explain his requirements. Basically, he stated the following:
Well Andrew, what I want is a flag design for my company…I have a drawing here. It is to be blue and white, representing a J and an S. The J is like a striped-flag, and the S should have a square. Sorry this is confusing, it’s hard to explain what I require…
I assured John this was okay, but suggested he fax over the drawing of the flags so I could evaluate what needed to be achieved:
Image: John Smith’s initial drawings.
Aha, the visual representation — this is what I needed. Now that I knew what John was trying to explain, I agreed to provide him with 3 separate styles for his flag logo icon as follows:
Simple flag concepts with no gradients.
Illustrative-classic looking flag and Illustrative Web 2.0 style flags.
I created the flag for John in vector format, meaning that is could be scaled up or down with no loss of quality. Like shown above in red and black, I constructed vector-forms and filled spaces with colour (in a nut-shell).
John was very specific in what he wanted in regard to colour and shape, so I designed for him flag icons that would tie-in well to his Marine consultancy business. I’m glad he wanted white and blue, as green, for example, would wrongly procure connotations of the famous brand, John Smiths Lager.
Oddly, though, he never asked for any kind of type to accompany the flag. I asked him why this — and he told me he would just add the type himself. Obviously, I wasn’t happy about that, so I did some mock-up examples for him (with the icons plus text) and sent them as a PDF. I explained that, really, text was needed to reinforce his company identity. After-all, I wasn’t designing a symbol whereby the logo text could eventually be dropped, like the Nike logo.
When he saw my designs, he was very impressed and agreed the the type was (obviously) a necessity. He chose the classic-styled flag — which was my personal favourite, and received the logo in various sizes in professional formats and for varied use.
This is one particular project that I learned a great deal about working with clients that possess little knowledge of logo design. It was a pleasure working for John, yet the experience has taught me that sometimes, things that are obvious to designers aren’t so clear to clients.
I always endeavour not just to do a good job, but a great one. So I’m glad that I didn’t just do as asked and provide a logo with no text. Indeed, I wanted to design something we could both be happy with — and what would help grow Johns business. Anthony Zinni of Positive Space Blog has a great post on challenging your clients. It’s a great resource and a worth-while read.
Also, graphic designers David Airey and Jacob Cass both have excellent articles on the misconceptions and habits of clients. If you know of any other great resources on this subject, please let me know.
What do you think of the logos? Do you think the best icon was chosen? I’d love to hear your thoughts…
Hi Andrew,
Interesting write-up. When I look at the flag I see the ‘J’ on the right, where the ‘S’ is supposed to appear. Do the symbols John sent represent a form of marine communication? That would help explain his idea.
David Aireys last blog post..davidairey.com featured in HOW Magazine
Hi David,
As John appeared to find it hard explaining what he wanted, although he knew in his mind, I never actually fully understood myself what he meant by representing the ‘J’ and the ‘S’ in a symbolic-form, seemingly graphically unrelated to these letter-forms.
What I ascertained from what John told me is that these shapes represented his name as some part of traditional standing of his family name, sort of like an English Coat of Arms. This is why I asked him to fax me over drawings of what he meant. It would have been beneficial to do more research, and have further talks with him about his ideas, but his design budget was quite limiting.
Thanks for stopping by….
Hi Andrew,
I like the final application of the flag with the name horizontally. Did it not stand out enough without the light blue cloud behind it? I think it would look really clean if it was the flag on it’s own. Nice post
Brian Yerkess last blog post..Most Important Thing I Would Tell A Design Student
Clean, simple: nice.
@ Brian
I tried the flag without the background, but it needed more contrast because of the white/grey elements of the flag. Yeah, it would have been cleaner without, but in this case, I felt it worked well.
Thanks for stopping by my site.
@ Richard, you’re welcome…
**NOTE: PREVIOUS GRAVATARS MAY NOT APPEAR ON THIS POST DUE TO ADMIN CODE CHANGES, FUTURE POSTS WILL NOT BE AFFECTED**
I’m new in the internet business field. I’m skilled in the graphics side, but I need info to learn about this business. I was going through your post and got a few pointers.
Very neat work. A lot of designers fall down in this area …. if you zoom in on their work they are sloppy.
If I ever outsource a task to anyone (rare) before I hire I often ask to see a vector because basically I want to zoom in and check to see if they are sloppy or not.
You did say from your first blog that a big thing for you is perfectionism and I can see in your process images that you’ve taken great care with this design to be neat about it.
What every designer I think should imagine is the horror of catching their logo on the side of a bus and spotting one tiny little of place line … you would die. I know I would.
Digitial Graphics … if you want to know about the business side of things I’ve written a small guide for new freelancers at http://www.trulyace.com/blog/how-to-become-a-freelance-graphic-designer/ that you may find useful.
Amanda Vlahakiss last blog post..Where Is Tara & The Weather Pops
@Amanda
I see what you mean there. Once, I downloaded a new logo design from a well-known designer (no names here, there’s no reason to), only to find that when I zoomed in, vectors didn’t line up.
When I design a vector logo, I will normally work on a 100cm Width x 80cm Hight document in Illustrator®, so I can zoom into the smallest detail. I think that perfectionism and design can be one-and-the-same 🙂
Thanks for the link, I’ll take a look…