The design of their current logo is not user-friendly:
1. The detailed heart graphic fails to deliver a simple and young image to the audience
2. There are too many variations of the colour red on the logo
3. The fading effect makes the logo hard to read
The students would like to have a new logo which is simple and easy-to-use. Also, they want to highlight the Chinese character "心照" on the logo design and at the same time keep it young and modern.
In the beginning, I went to the design websites such as Pinterest and Behance to look for different Chinese logo designs for reference. I also researched some Chinese typography design to study how to create a Chinese character in different ways.
After researching for other references, I started brainstorming the ideas by hand my sketchbook. I tried to use as many ways as possible to write the Chinese character and see the effect of different typography styles.
Among the ideas, I picked a few designs I like and I put it on the illustrator to further explore. After consulting with the students' opinion, we decided to use the simple thin lines with round corner to design the Chinese words, making it look simple, young and modern.
After that, I selected the designs I like and digitalized them on Illustrator.
In their original logo design, they use a "heart" as the graphic mark.The elaborated and decorated design of the heart presents a more traditional and serious image to the audience. To present a young and simple image, I used a minimal approach to create the design and I come up with two ideas.
I used "an open door" as the key symbol which represents people open their heart to the world and they are willing to share and communicate with other people.
The design is created by two circle dots, which depicts the punctuation ":" (colon). The Colon can symbolize "communication" and the two dots can represent two people - One is the speaker and the other one is the listener. I hope this simple design could visualize the message of communication.
The students love the colon concept so I refined the size and spacing and create the final design. For colours, as I want to avoid using bright or saturated colour and instead, I chose a dark brown as the brand colour.
There are two reasons behind. First, I want to put the focus on the words and the graphic. Second, I want to create a brand associated with a less emotional character. With its mission to encourage people to open their heart and share with others, I believe people are more willing to share in a quiet and peaceful environment. Using a bright red or a colourful design is not a good fit for that image.
