Logo design is one of the very few areas where even the most seasoned professional will not start right away on the screen.
So unless you are an adept of canned vector ‘art’ and your client is looking for corporate identity on the cheap, the old way is the only way. Accordingly, we started with pencil sketches, used erasers liberally, and kept brainstorming for quite a while. Taking into account all the variations in colors, gradients, shapes, typefaces and special tweaks, the logo went through 138 iterations. The reward: a proposal that the 24 members of the Mur Manteau’s executive committee approved right away.
To a clean and simple logo designed for visual impact, we added clean and simple guidelines designed for practicability. They fit on three pages. Having worked for many German companies, we have seen corporate identity guidelines so complex that compliance is a constant nightmare (the most extreme of them all, for an admittedly very large and very famous company, came as a collection of five fat binders…).
Consistent design is essential—psycho-rigidity is not.