Thursday 30th January

Following the meeting and the research I have gathered for my branding project I had to start designing some logo concepts today. I have worked on branding projects with Adam before Christmas, but on these occasions I was expected to produce one or two logo concepts while Adam worked on three or four. However because I am running the project I am expected to come up with three or four, while Adam only needs to work on one. I am excited by the challenge and appreciate being given a project that I can take ownership of, but having to come up with four different concepts is a little overwhelming. I have the technical ability to create logos, but I don’t have the creativity. Having this mind set makes the task even more difficult because I am trying to design with a negative attitude.

I still have another three full days before I need to put forward the concepts to the client, so I have enough time to keep working on this project, which is what I will do. As much as I find it scary I cannot shy away from these situations because I need to learn to be comfortable in them to progress in this profession. As I mentioned before, I am competent with Illustrator and can easily design a logo, it’s the lack of ideas that is setting me back. I have spoken to Adam about this today and he suggested to keep looking at competitors’ logos and finding similarities in them and elements or colours that never appear, to get an idea of what does and doesn’t work in logos for this type of business. He also suggested that I get into a habit of looking on Pinterest and design websites daily and this will help me to naturally build up a bank of inspiration. Hopefully by doing this idea generation will gradually become second nature. If all else fails Julian has already stressed that if I am finding it too much work I must tell them and they are understanding of the fact that I have never worked in industry before. However, this is a last resort and I would really like to prove my capabilities to both Revolution Inc., the client, and myself!
The business is called Sales Force 10 Recruitment, and the client talked a lot about circular shapes and stripes being incorporated into the logo concepts, and they also liked clever logos, such as FedEx, that use negative space. I tried to incorporate stripes, but I think that it would make the business look more like a fashion label, so I stuck with looking at round designs and ways of using negative space. I also came across a recruitment logo that turns the 'R' into a person, which I really liked, so I started sketching out ideas for each of these concepts. By lunchtime I had three rough concepts with a number of sketches for each that I could then start to translate on Illustrator. However, when it got to the afternoon I was struggling to come up with new ideas, and Julian needed a discount card designing by the end of the day so I worked on this after lunch. This didn't take long, and I would have had time to carry on working on the branding, but I felt that I needed more of a break, and if I left the project where it was then I would easily be able to pick it up in the morning and translate my ideas on to screen. In addition, the branding is not due until Wednesday, where I had a mail shot that needed doing for Friday, so I decided to spend the rest of the afternoon finishing this.