This week, after deciding exactly how I wanted to solve the issue of young people not being taught enough life skills in school, I started thinking about how i wanted to present this. I bounced around a few ideas for names for the company including Think Forward, Forward Thinking and Live Ahead all of which show the company is all about education that can take you further ahead in life. After doing a quick google on some of these I found most of the already exist as company names and tend to have a similar concept of teaching a specific audience different skills. After some time I decided on the name Smart Skills as I felt it was relevant and to the point.

   

After finalising what the company was to be called and creating a quick sketch of what i wanted the logo to look like. The design I went with is a light bulb (which is commonly associated with an idea and being bright/smart) with a spanner for the inside as the light (to represent skills).  I opened Adobe Illustrator and created different variations of the initial idea. I tried different line weights and changed small details that could effect the way consumers saw the company. I decided in the design in the bottom left hand corner as I thought the lines indicating light on the last two of each line was too much detail and unnecessary for the representation of the company and decided the lines to represent a screw bulb gave a more professional look to the logo and something I could see to my advantage later on when doing my visual representation for this project.

When starting to think about the solution for the problem this project is based on, I knew I wanted to keep what ever I designed towards this sophisticated yet colourful. So when I designed the logo, I started to play around with colour and created a couple colour palettes that I though would work well with the theme of the project and also the target audience. I wanted basic primary colours so made pallets of variations of reds, blues and yellows. However, when I asked for a peers opinion of colour selection they said they associated the colour green to education so I decided to Incorporated green and also orange (this made the colours work better together and means I have more to be creative with) to the colours to my primary colour and adjusted them to complement each other. The final palette is shown on my style guide.

 

Deciding on a font to use in the branding of the company took some time and a lot of trial and error. In the end I decided on the typeface Raleway as I feel it will work well for all occasions whether used in 12pt for a paragraph of text or as a title or logo, its versatile and has many font variations with in it which will give me much more room to be creative yet keeping the style of the company cohesive and it also works well with the theme and logo. I also tried different variations of how to layout the logo, where to place the main logo in correlation to the name of the company. I decided on 3 different ways the logo can be used and how colour can be incorporated with each one.