This course is the culmination of the Graphic Design Specialization and gives you an opportunity to tie together your knowledge and skills into a single project: a brand development guide for a company you will invent. This course takes you through the entire design process, from ideation to creation to presentation. Through the guide, you will be creating and giving a visual identity to an imaginary start-up company, and applying that visual identity to a number of forms. You will also develop a logotype and accompanying graphic palette to visually represent your company, as well as apply that design to a number of different applications to see it at work. Note: Only learners who have earned a certificate in the four previous courses in the Specialization are eligible to take the Capstone.
Typographic Skeletons
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From the course by California Institute of the Arts
Brand New Brand
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From the lesson
Logotype: Brand Your Brand
In this module you will learn how to create a logotype for your company, with emphasis on finessing typographic forms.
Meet the Instructors
Michael WorthingtonFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
School of Art
A good way to get starting structure, or skeleton, for
your logotype is to look at typefaces that already exist that might have shapes of
letters that you think are particularly interesting or relevant to your company,
or they might have a conceptual or formal connection to your company.
So if I look at my S-CAR-GO selection of typefaces,
I'd be choosing them for quite different reasons,
and I'd be looking at a different range of typographic forms, but
they cover different ideas and head in different directions.
The first one is a contemporary sans-serif, and
I like the geometric forms, the round O feels like a wheel, and
I also like the rounded terminals in the letter forms,
and that's because these have something of the quality of a snail's body.
For this second typeface,
I'm choosing a typeface that's by the French type designer Roger Excoffon,
and I feel like this has a very, very French feeling to it.
But by choosing this particular cut of the typeface that's rounded at the corners,
it also feels, again, a little bit like a snail-like form.
But then using the italic gives it some direction and speed, as well.
And this third typeface I chose because it's used for
Jean Du Godard's movie titles, which I feel like they
have a connection to the student protests in Paris in 68.
And I chose this particular typeface because I like the repetition in the C,
the G, and the O.
And that circular repetition, you can see it in the lower case as well,
with the c, the a, the g and the o.
It feels a little bit like wheels so it has a sense of motion to me.
I also like the fact that it feels modern and contemporary, and
it feels a little bit kind of classy as well, so I feel like it could fulfill
some of the requirements of my adjectives that I picked for my company.
This type face I chose because I really liked the forms of it,
clearly just because they feel a little bit old-fashioned, they feel a little bit
Art Deco, but they've also got a nice flow to them and a nice rhythm.
So they feel a little bit alive, a little bit organic, so
that felt like it was quite relevant to the company as well.
And this final version, I chose this typeface because it's very similar
to a lot of European license plates on cars, so I felt like there
was a connection there to the Citroen 2CV that was part of my backstory.
So again, you can there's a lot of different reasons why you might choose
a particular starting point or particular skeleton.
But any of these skeletons that you choose, you're not going to use them in
a literal way as a typeface, you're going to have to alter them, and
change the forms of them, and really think about the particular letter forms
you've got in your word and how to make them be much more distinct.
You might end up at this stage in your process with quite a lot of typefaces to
look at, so how are you going to narrow them down?
Well, one good way is to quite quickly take them for a test drive.
Really just throw them around, look at their forms, and do some really fast
visual test, just to see if there's something interesting there,
because you never know what you're going to hit on, and this can be a fun and
experimental and playful part of your process as well.
So if we skip over to our real-world example, Pasadena Conservatory of Music,
these are some of initial tests that we did when we were just looking at typefaces
that we thought had potential.
So you can see that rather than just picking a typeface, and
then letting it have one iteration, we were carrying out various different
iterations and trying out various different formal things quite quickly.
And we weren’t expecting all of these to work in any way at all,
we were really just trying to generate a lot of material, and
really explore the typographic territory.
And then we'd sit down, look at what we'd made and fine analyze, and
pick out the things that were interesting, and maybe things that we were going to
develop a little bit further and take to the next stage of the identity.
So you can think about this stage of the project,
as if it's a kind of digital sketching.
So,you're not really looking at finessing anything, or making anything
be a final finished logotype, but what you are trying to do is explore and
do a rough sketch of the possibilities for these letter forms.
And what you'll find is, because we're used to working on the computer now,
even a sketch can look quite finished quite quickly.
And the key here is for you to really remember that they're just sketches and
that you're going to have a lot more to explore as you progress with the project.
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