After a slew of fairly personal logos, I had the opportunity, a few months ago, to design a logo for something a bit more detached from a person. Strangely enough, the non-person that is a brand sometimes needs even more personality, especially when it is trying to sell itself to individuals and tribes of them. Designing for a retail brand is very much a process of character building and fiction of the most pre-meditated kind.
The people at Ecosloth found me, of all places, through my very-ignored Pinterest account, They asked if I could help them put a face to their new clothing and lifestyle brand, whose scope was still open and developing while its personality is something they were most passionate about. It’s useful to have passionate clients when you’re working on design, because the passion helps to communicate what they need, and that makes your job that much easier. Designers are often working blind when coming up with branding; Thankfully this was not one of those occasions.
Ecosloth is the culmination of one of those typical friendly conversations about how “we should do something”, only in this case the friends involved took the next step and decided they wanted to start a classy and stylish t-shirt company, among other things, for smart people. The concept was to meld the idea of the clever t-shirt with a certain sophisticated aesthetic. It then grew beyond t-shirts into other products people can buy, and I’m sure the explorations will continue.
I was given an idea of what sort of personality the brand embodied in their minds and the one essential requirement, was that the logo be bold and graphic in a very universal way so that it could be included into the illustration that would form the basis of the products designed. It would need to be mutable and not too dependent on specific colours and visual treatments. Thankfully, a couple of illustrated graphics were already ready for me to look at, which served as good visual launch-points for what I came up with. A free-wheeling chat about mass extinctions and tree-hugging later, there was a basic notion and this final brand stamp resulted.
I haven’t had many chances to design a logo that needs to be used so heavily in the actual product someone is trying to sell, so I welcomed the opportunity. The less corporate approach to what makes appropriate branding was also a refreshing change, and I quite like the end result. More importantly, there is the satisfaction that this has the potential to be actually seen, used and worn by people rather than forever being assigned to rare letter heads. That idea I’m quite happy about.
The Ecosloth team is just getting to their feet and since they’ve just launched their website, I though it was about time to give them a shout-out for work I quite enjoyed. I wish them the best of luck with their grand schemes.
Samir
