BLOG POST

I recently had the privilege of working with Undersea Productions, an undersea imaging company based out of Australia, to re-brand their visual identity. They felt there old logo was blah and they wanted something more clean, creative and memorable.

First off, let me show you the old and new logo.

Old Logo:

New Logo:

The Journey

The journey began with studying the underworld animal kingdom. I enjoyed watching several of the company’s own video footage for a lot of this. Once I felt I had a good grasp on their business I started the sketching process. I filled several pages with various ideas.

Sample of some of the sketches along the way

I experimented with dozens of ideas integrating cameras, different sea animals, etc.

Here are just a couple of the ideas that were developed along the way:

Integrating a whale into the type.

The client had originally hoped to include a humpback whale into the logo. This was one of the concepts that integrated that idea.

School of fish forming an eye.

Similar thinking to the winning logo but not as much unity in the two design elements.

The Winning Concept

The eventual chosen concept was developed in later on in the project. We wanted to combine an aperture and fish together in a way that would be recognizable while keeping the fish on the realistic side as apposed to the stylized side . Early executions of this had me doubting if the concept could actually fly. After several re-iterations and sketching, re-sketching and fine tuning in Illustrator I was finally able to get it where we wanted it to be.

Evolution of the icon:

As you can see, the early executions of the concept were quite rough. But thanks to a faithful client and some hard work we were able to evolve it to something successful.

For the type I used slightly customized version of Avenir Book. It’s a nice rounded font that matches the icon.

Horizontal/Web layout version with tag line.

Vertical version.

Black and white icon.

Overall, the client and I were very pleased with the final design and feel it fills their visual identity very well. Looking forward to seeing in use on DVD spines, uniforms, etc.

Once again, always love to hear your thoughts.

Cheers,
Siah

Romans 8:38-39