Live Water Surf Shop

PROJECT DETAILS:

Live Water is a surf and skate shop that has been in Marin County since 1978. However, their two stores have completely different branding elements and no distinct logo. My mission was to create a unifying logo that encompassed the duality of the area and their product lines: mountains and beach, surf and skate. The logo had to work for both stores and be scalable to work in a variety of scenarios, from a large sign to small hang tags.

CATEGORIES:

Logo design, Branding

Briefs, Not Boxers

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Once all the dust settles from making sure you and your client are a good personality fit, agreeing to quotes, and signing contracts, the first step in any project is to gather information. After many years of creating logos, I have put together a simple Design Brief for clients to fill out to gather basic information like their official business name, tagline, target audiences, the feel they want their logo to capture, styles they like, and their timeline. In the case of Live Water we did the Design Brief over the phone with a short discovery call so we could get to know one another a bit more. I was able to get a sense of what the logo needed to do and historically what Live Water had used as a logo. Unification and connection were the key to the whole project.

Sketches (and not the comedy kind)

With all of the information I need to get started, I began sketching out some ideas on pen and paper. I still prefer actually drawing when it comes to getting ideas out, even if they don’t look great! I’m just trying to get the idea down so I know what to do when I turn to the computer. My goal is to come up with more ideas than I need and narrow it down to 3-5 I want to build out digitally. I write myself notes in the margins to make sure I remember my ideas.

Digimon Digital Monsters

Onto the computer we go! Well, actually, to the iPad! For this project I used a little of both to recreate my designs digitally.Some people prefer to just make things in black and white for to just do enough to get the idea across when it comes to this stage. I prefer to fully flesh out my sketches because it’s easier for me and the client to visualize. I set the color scheme at the beginning and use only those colors to recreate my top ideas in Illustrator. Every good color scheme includes a range of light and dark colors! In this stage I will often make some alternative versions of my designs. In the case of Live Water I went a step further and created a main logo, an alternative logo, a badge, and a small format logo for each design. They needed to use the logos in a wide variety of places so I wanted to show the scalability when I presented each design.

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Now Presenting

Once the logos are created and tweaked, it’s time to name them and put them into a presentation for the client. In a last minute move, I decided one of my designs (Option 6) wasn’t strong enough to make the cut. I actually digitized one more design than I planned to so I was able to eliminate it and still have 5 solid designs. At the beginning of the presentation I like to include the colors, fonts, elements and/or themes I used to create the logos. I also present each logo on a different colored background so the client can get a sense of their versatility. When I send the presentation I either have a call with the client to walk them through it or I send it in an email with descriptions of each logo and their design elements. Now it’s a waiting game to see which one they like best!