IXD103 – Week Two
The start of this week’s class saw us have a group discussion about our potential brand names, seeking reasons as to why we chose certain names and how they relate to our brand values. This was useful for me as it allowed me to get valuable feedback and see how my brand actually relates to my values while also making adjustments to my initial brand logo.
Our next task was to go out into the city and find 3 brands which we felt enhance and represent the same brand values that we have chosen for our brand. We went out and looked at brands such as Tesco and Starbucks and this was a good experience and it allowed us to gather valuable primary research, instead of just diving straight for the search engine.
Week Two’s lecture saw us look at the importance of Wordmarks for a brand and how they can be a key identifiable mark for the consumer. A wordmark, word mark, or logotype is usually a distinct text-only typographic treatment of the name of a company, institution, or product name used for purposes of identification and branding. Examples can be found in the graphic identities of the Government of Canada, FedEx, Microsoft, and IBM.
We were reintroduced to letterforms after initially gaining an insight into it in semester one. This was important for me as it refreshed my memory in an important topic for our upcoming project. Letterforms are developed as an alternative to the spoken word – from pictograms/icons to the alphabets we know today. It communicates a message where the originator is not able to be present.
We learned about the anatomy of type again showing how important it is to experiment with different styles and elements of type to make your branding unique. The anatomy of type is an important feature of typography as it allows you to express your brand in different ways using different techniques. Just like it’s important to learn the anatomy of a human in order to make informed diagnoses, understanding the anatomy of type will enable you to see what is right and wrong in type, use it effectively and appropriately talk about it with other designers.
To help us when we go away and try to experiment with our own word marks for our brand we took another look at the elements of typography such as Kerning and ligatures with showed me how you can have your own unique effect on a piece of type and why that will be effective when creating our own word marks.