Studio Practice: OUGD406 - Studio Brief 3 - Study Task 1

Once we had found out our groups for studio brief 3 we were set a day long study task to rebrand Tower Works Leeds to set us up for doing all the branding for the exhibition. As a group I feel we worked well together, we discussed the history and the purpose of the building and came up with a concept pretty quickly. When it came to designing we all started with thumbnail sketches of logo ideas based on our concept. Initially we were a bit indecisive to which designs we wanted to use but once we had decided we worked really quickly on producing our outcomes.

INITIAL IDEAS.

We had lots of initial ideas, in fact I think we had too many as we couldn't decide on one idea. After looking at the history of the building we found that it used to make steel pins for carding which is a method of taking raw wool and combing it to realign the fibres to be parallel. We really liked this idea of straightening fibres out and going from a mess to organised fibres. We took this on board and Thea came up with the idea below, representing the 3 towers, going from overlapping fibres to parallel ones.

We also took the idea of the steel pins literally - using pins that could be part of a stationary set relating to the purpose of the building now and they could be pins used in textiles relating to the use of the building in the past. We tried with the letters inside of the pins and to represent the 3 towers as 3 pins. I really liked this idea because it had a really strong concept and link to the building. However we thought that perhaps the concept was too subtle - people wouldn't know what the building was about with this logo and it lacks the iconic nature of the architecture of the building.

LOGO DEVELOPMENT.
We went with Rhys' idea for our logo as we felt that it was the most contemporary out of all the designs that we had produced. He started with an initial sketch abstractly representing the shapes of the 3 towers and mocked it up digitally. (He mistook the tower works for temple works which is another place in Leeds).

We decided that the colours didn't go well at all and we felt that they came from nowhere. Also the font choice felt too industrial - even though it is an industrial building we wanted to make it more welcoming.

Next we changed the font to one that was similar to that on the archway into the site of Tower Works and came up with our final logo almost. It was just the colour choice that we had to decide on. I really liked the idea of mimicking the colours of the bricks but as you can see here it feels a bit too dull so in the end we went for a bright orange to push the contemporary vibes.

FINAL REBRAND.