Logo Development: gck Consulting

I’ve never liked to charge an hourly fee for design. I don’t like “billable hours” to be a variable in my price or quality. Certainly, I look at the complexity of a project and try to anticipate the time and effort spent but after that I’d rather be free to spend a little extra time making sure that I’m happy with my work. I also realize that time is relative. An hour of house work lasts forever. When I’m hunched over my monitor, meticulously adjusting curves and alignments with a focus that would put Rain Man to shame, the hours fly by. This means putting in time making sure a logo (or any design) is carefully crafted in ways that my client might not even notice. But I notice. And I like to think that that quality shows through, even if someone can’t quite put their finger on why.

Comic Sans

This leads me to my recent logo design work for gck Consulting. gck is a firm I’ve done some work with on brochures and other print items. After working back and forth a few times with them and getting to know them better I decided to confront them about their logo and taking the next step with their identity and branding.

Their original logo utilizes a font called Comic Sans. It’s a font whose use has become faux pas and has been subject to much hate from designers online sited by many blogs and articles and even an anti-Comic Sans site: bancomicsans.com.

Sans Comic Sans

I wanted to stick with a logotype (i.e. a logo which is text with no icon). I started exploring fonts which I felt fit. Since gck Consulting likes to position itself as professional but still approachable, I ended up splitting those two characteristics to different characteristics of the logo: The professional side would be covered by the font and the approachable side would be covered by the colour palette.

I did a long search for fonts and eventually landed on Gotham HTF from font foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones. I stuck with the lowercase “gck” and lowercase “consulting” and began working from there. The “g” bothered me though. The ear of the “g” was too tall, I didn’t feel like the bowl & counter was round enough, especially when placed next to the “c”. I started making some adjusting by taking a circle and extending the curve at the top of the bowl to shrink the ear. I also made adjustments to the descender and a little bit of niggling with the ascender of the “k” to work it all in with measurements I had referenced from “consulting”.

After the black logotype was complete, I started looking at colour palettes. The owner of gck had expressed that she liked her original colours. This was a good hint since a logo, besides communicating a message to its target market, should inspire its company’s personnel as well. Paying homage to the original logo, I began exploring colour palettes using Adobe’s Kuler. I started with updating the teal colour and softening it up just a bit until I found a tone I liked, and then used Kuler’s tools to assist me in finding complementary colours.

 

I tried a few different ways of utilizing the colour palette. Again, this was an exercise where I logged in more hours than my client might expect but I wanted to make sure I had found the best design, this meant playing with various gradients and opacities but, in the end, the simplest design was the best.

The client and staff loved the new logo and seemed to enjoy that it had a continuation of their past identity. Once the other branded items have been completed (business cards, stationary, embroidered logo, etc.) I’ll post it in my portfolio for you to see but for now, you can view the final primary logo below. Comments are very welcome. Thanks for reading!

Logo Development: gck Consulting. #freelance #graphicdesign is.gd/RycSfy

— Travis Ulrich (@UlrichDesign) July 20, 2012