Rebranding Burflex 1.0

It's not uncommon for businesses to rebrand themselves. Large organisations such as Apple, Google and Amazon refresh their logo to reflect the company's new direction. Businesses tend to rebrand by anticipating the market trends and solving issues of the current brand. Recently, due to the technology boom, companies are rebranding their logos to make them suit the digital age as it's becoming more portable and it'll be able to cater for people with small screens and slow connections. 

Ebay is a web based business that allows anyone to buy or sell items. The items are bid on in an online auction. Their original logo is purely a sans-serif font, with each letter being a different primary colour. Personally, I think this is a good concept as the company want people to connect but the different sized letters and dodgy opacity makes it look dated and informal. 

In 2012, after 17 years, ebay rebranded themselves to a much more slim lined, less shouty logo. They've kept the vibrant primary colour scheme but made the colours more harmonious in tone which will still make the company recognisable. Instead of overlapping the letters, Ebay have decided to use a narrow kerning which I much prefer to the original as it's much more contemporary and reflects a more mature organisation. 

Burflex

In a group of four, we were set a brief to rebrand a current business that sponsor Leeds United football club. The organisation we were given was Burflex. We began by researching into the business to get an idea of what they do, their aims and any USP's they have in order to tailor our designs to suit their business. 

Burflex is a Northern company that provides scaffolding services for the construction of buildings, bridges and football stadiums. They are confident that they can provide a good service no matter how big the project is. The business is growing and new technology is allowing them to digitally plan projects so they are safer and more efficient. 

The current logo is predominantly a bold, heavy and flat font in an analogous colour scheme. It doesn't excite me as it looks very basic and the font is too heavy. The colour scheme doesn't suggest it's a building/scaffolding company, more gardening due to the visual connotations of the green type. I think a rebrand could help the business appeal to a wider market if they use a more contemporary type because the current logo looks dated and brands need to make sure they keep up with the current market. The purpose of a logo is to communicate to an audience and be memorable. Brands such as McDonalds and Coca Cola both have famous logos that haven't needed to be rebranded and people recognise all around the world. This logo isn't memorable. As the "face" of the company, the logo doesn't have any individual or quirky characteristics that stimulates the audience. 

The target market is an important aspect to think about when branding a business. Designing a logo that's too abstract or even simple can result in people being put off it. Burflex is a specialist company which means their services will predominantly be required by tradesmen that need scaffolding specialist to help on a project. Burflex also sponsor Leeds United football club which is watched and supported by tradesmen. This sponsorship acts as advertising as the logo is printed on programs, kit and displayed around the stadium.

Typography

Graphic Designer; Vignellis stated that their are too many fonts because of the digital age and type should be limited to six basic fonts: 

The brief stated that we could create a logo but we were limited to these six fonts. This made the task more intriguing as all the other groups had the same options and I was intrigued as to how people would approach it. In my group, we decided to trial out each font with the brand name and apply the information we'd learnt about Burflex to see which type face best suited the brand.




Personally, I favour serif over sans-serif fonts but as a group we thought that Garamond was too formal to use for the specific task. The old style didn't reflect Burflex as a company, moving forward and always looking ahead. 





Bodoni is another font that I like because of its balance in weight. The main body of the characters is thick and then thinner, more subtle areas on the beak and ascenders. It is a very smart type but once again, it is an older style so it wouldn't have suited the brand.



Futura is a sans-serif font, it is a heavy weight but there are options to change the style to light and ultra-light which would be worth experimenting with. The font is very clean so it would be interesting to play around with kerning.





Times New Roman is a common type that is used in print for books and newspapers so it isn't a very adventurous font. However, after learning about ways to manipulate font it could be an interesting choice. As a group we want to stay away from classic styles at this point. 



Helvetica is a font that has a lot of different variations which means it could be a useful font to play around with. 









After discussing ideas and debating which type would be best suited, we are going to try designing the logo using Futura and Helvetica. Even though my personal preference is serif, I think a sans-serif font is more in tune with what Burflex is currently doing as a growing business. 

Initial Ideas  

During a group discussion and brainstorm, about what primary ideas we had, I thought we could use the text to resemble the scaffolding. Andrew Byrom is a designer that specialises in typography. He created an alphabet out of towel rails, of while some were later created for real. I knew I was restricted to a certain type face but I thought it would be interesting to see if I could play around with the text on Illustrator and see how I can make type look like scaffolding yet still readable. 

I began by using Futura because I liked the idea of kerning it and it still being legible. As an idea for creating the scaffolding effect, I hollowed out the text so that there was only the contours of the type. I wanted to keep things simple to begin with as the brief is only 5 days and as a group we wanted to show each other all of our ideas to critique. 

The outcome is very basic, I didn't want it to be too heavy so I lowered the stroke then duplicated the layer and placed it over the top. This made the text hard to read so I lowered the opacity of one of them but it made it look like it was in the distance. I still thought I could make this concept work so made the type 3D using the pen tool on Illustrator. Illustrator was really useful and accurate compared to Photoshop.  

I experimented with letters that had different characteristics, so I could see if the 3D concept would work on them. I started with 'F' because I was intrigued as to what a letter with horizontal and vertical lines. I wasn't sure whether the concept would make the type readable due to my previous experimentation.

                                                                                         

I am pleased with how I managed to create a 'skeleton' of the type, which is a good start for creating the scaffolding effect. I added colour so that it was easier to identify the letter. We still need to think about colour. 

Ideas that me and my group were debating: 


We hand drew some ideas to explain to each other what ideas we had. I found this easier to show people a rough version of my idea. As a group we wanted the type to resemble the scaffolding as the original logo is purely a bold type face. 

As it was a sans-serif font it was easier to play around with the kerning which is reflected in these sketches. 

We all liked the idea of extending some of the lines to resemble the scaffolding from our drawings but we didn't know whether it would work on Futura or Helvetica as a type face. 

We found this a really useful technique for sharing our ideas, especially cause we could all add our input and draw over designs to make them better.




Moving forward with this concept, I used Helvetica ultra-light on Illustrator and used the pen tool to simply extend the lines:

We chose to use Helvetica Ultra-Light because we felt the quality of line was sharper and modern. I personally thought that this concept was really smart and current. The extended lines make the 'U' more free flowing and the added line to the F gives it structure. Although we liked this composition we didn't think it was strong enough to stand out, especially in the Leeds football stadium where people would see it from a distance. To try and solve the problem, I tried layering the type. To make the logo easier to see and remember, we thought adding a colour in would help benefit the audience and composition. When we were thinking about colour, we knew we wanted to move away from the current green and red. Researching into Burflex, we noticed that they pride themselves on a good health and safety record so we thought about using yellow on the black type to represent the safety tape:

I like the layered effect because it better represents the scaffolding effect. However, I think the design isn't heavy enough. Yellow may be a tricky colour to use for the type, as it can be hard to see on a white background. 

I took the elements that I liked from the past experiments, such as the addition of lines to the text, except I changed the stroke of them to make it look more constructive. Then I put a boarder around it to confine the text which made me realise I'd created negative space. Between the E and the X created an arrow so I filled that in yellow to support the forward movement of the business. I was pleased with the outcome of the concept as it is more interesting to look at because of the negative space the addition of the lines and boarder have made. 

Other concepts my group created:

Same yellow and black colour scheme, with the addition of the grey extensions on the 'U'. I think the grey is a better colour to use than black because it's more harmonious. Black can be too strong whereas the grey is a mid-tone. The almost subscripted lettering is a good concept but we thought it made it too disjointed.

A lot of the designs we'd created so far have been very slender and thin so we tried moving away from that to see what the results would be if we used a bolder type. A member of my group experimented with changing the size of the font and creating a layered effect. We thought it was a lot stronger as it was still bold but it had subtle type changes to make it balanced. I like the way he has extended the bottom of the 'F' and the 'R' to make it look like the added lexis 'scaffolding' is holding it up. Some of the tones of yellow are too creamy, the black is too bold and the grey is too light. We researched into what the colours grey and yellow mean to see if it could reflect on the business well. The connotations of grey are reliable, professional, and stable. Yellow suggests optimism, enthusiasm, confidence and logic. 

We all agreed that we liked this concept so we took it away and tried tweaking certain aspects such as the colour and the text. We didn't want anything too complex with too many lines. An aspect that we felt needed changing was the imbalance with the typography. There are three different sizes of letters which I felt wasn't strong. 

Final Outcome

 

We settled for Helvetica because it was bold and balanced. We played around with the kerning so that all of the type was close and joined together. I like the way the 'U' is conjoined between the B and the R which represents Burflex's connection with there customers. We kept the 'SCAFFOLDING LTD' in from the original because we felt that people wouldn't know what Burflex did if they saw them for the first time. The main issue with the outcome is the colour scheme. Yellow on white isn't visible enough. Reflecting on the process I do think it would have been good to make the type represent scaffolding or building because I think that would help them remember the brand. On the other hand, it would be hard to make that concept work. Researching into Burflex definitely tailored our designs, especially after thinking about the target audience. We wanted the logo to attract the target audience and we would have gotten a lot of publicity at the football stadium which is why we made it bolder. The group dynamics were good, we all had ideas that we wanted to share and feedback was pushing our ideas further. However, due to the short timescale it was hard to find the time to adapt the designs and I think by the time we had to hand it in, it was too late to change the yellow colour scheme, which was my main worry. As a group we all listened to each other but their were lots of different styles being thrown around which created a bit of tension when wanting to justify change.

In the 5 days, we had to create the logo and then produce a presentation to show how and why we did what we did to get our final outcome and educate everyone on who and what Burflex is.  

If we had more time to complete this brief I would have spent more time planning and brainstorming sketches. I felt that was a really good way of generating ideas and if we had the chance to spend longer on that then I would have liked to experimented more with the negative space, colour and shape. It would have been nice if I had the chance to experiment with a serif style font because I thought that would have been an exciting challenge. To stretch our research further we could have looked for a social media account for Burflex on Facebook or Twitter. We could have looked into the language they use so we'd be able to tell how formal and the relationships they have with their customers. This could have allowed us to tailor our design to represent that. 

Group Feedback

Once we had presented our work to everyone, they gave us anonymous feedback on what they thought of our project all together. The results said that our research and analysis was really thorough and strong. Showing everyone our influences and explaining why we decided change things went down well. It's also important to remember not to put too much writing on the slides as we are talking about it anyway so only the images are required. Our feedback said that as a group we presented confidently and clearly however we need to try and sell the composition to them, as if they were our client. To do this, we need to be passionate and confident in our idea. The main aspect that let us down was the colour. Although we researched a lot into colour theory, the yellow on a black background just wasn't strong enough. If we had put a dark background behind it, it would have been a lot stronger. This was disappointing to hear because we'd spent so long designing it and the colour let us down. It just shows how important colour is. The subscripted 'U' had mixed reviews as some people thought it was a bit disjointed. 

Although we didn't think about it, the 'Scaffolding LTD' on the original logo was transferred onto ours. However, my tutor Richard said it could be changed to 'Group' to give the company a friendly look and give it a chance to expand and get bigger. 

General Feedback 

Once everyone had finished presenting, the general feedback that we got will help us in future projects. Our tutors said we need to stop saying 'nice' and 'good' because they don't really mean anything. It's also important to say why I've done something and justify the change. I need to make sure I state the challenging aspects so that I can explain how/if I overcame them.