Process: The Redner Group

A little while ago I was contacted about creating a logo for a brand new PR agency known as The Redner Group. Their areas of expertise are "video games, consumer electronics, and men's fashion," so I was pretty much on board right away. Visualizing PR without resorting to gimmicks is kind of a tricky thing, plus there was the added weight of creating something for a brand new company (as opposed to redesigns, which at least for me tends to be a bit more common). The one thing we established early on was that the color scheme would be primarily red-based (REDner, right?). With that in mind, I got to sketching in my handy-dandy Field Notes book:

Sketching wasn't going as well as I am maybe used to. Things were a little murky, although if there was one thing I did hit on at this stage it was the notion that the acronym TRG was potentially more visually interesting than writing out the whole name — I don't know why exactly, but it seemed to have interesting ligature possibilities. I decided to dive head-first into Illustrator, with less of a life-preserver than usual.

A few themes came out of this stage that would set the course for the rest of the process, namely acronyms and circles. The top left was a fairly successful (I thought, at least) full-name version, set into a rather abstract capital R. The other versions on top also intrigued me — I had primarily been using bold condensed sans-serifs like Bureau and Knockout (especially nice as cap acronyms, I think), but in this case I used a typeface my co-worker Ryan introduced me to called Calvert, which worked pretty well. The lower-right logo is a little too obviously Draplin-y, and yeah, it's kind of goofy.

So those were shown, some edits were made, new logos were shown, and we quickly hit upon these three "families:"

I should take this opportunity to mention how great a client Redner was. With every new batch, I felt like real progress was being made towards a solution we would both be happy with, which was really reassuring considering how this process tends to go sometimes. Anyway, I was pretty excited with the right option especially, but then this was pointed out to me:

Oops. Yeah, it's not the same typeface, but it was close enough to be an issue. It was right around this point that I think we both started gravitating towards the "acronym in a circle" option. Not because it had a whole lot of special meaning, but because both aesthetically and functionally it held the most promise. Next I made a whole slew of typeface/color variations:

Yeah, so some of those are a little wacky, but I felt like we were 90% of the way there and it was important to me to make sure no stone was left unturned. We narrowed that down to two options:

And then one:

Helvetica wins again. All in all I'm really happy with this solution, I think it lays a really solid groundwork for future visualizations of the brand. Like I said earlier, tt's somewhat rare for me to a create logo for a brand new company, and not a re-design of an existing logo, so the idea of "laying a good groundwork" was an important goal for me. Nothing too flashy or bogged down, just a no-nonsense mark ready to get to work.

Coming soon, another process-y kind of post on a year's worth of editorial illustration for the MG Newsletter.

Tags: logo, Process, red, redner

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 3:18 AM and is filed under Portfolio, Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.