It’s been a while since my last update, but I can finally show you guys the top secret project I’ve been working on for the past month and a half. The new revised layout and logo for Cinema Blend went live tonight and can be seen here. Site owner Josh Tyler and our web designer/coder Mike are still modifying and debugging stuff right now but it should probably be working right by morning. Anyways, I’m really happy with the way the site turned out. I didn’t have much to do with the design aspect as far as anything below the navigation goes so I’m really pleased to see how nicely everything came together. Excellent work guys!
I did have a lot to do with designing the logo and site identity, however, so that’s what I’ll be talking about. I love reading case studies for logos and seeing all the behind the scenes stuff that went in to the final logo so I thought I’d do something like that here.
A good logo always starts on paper. Usually this involves brainstorming ideas or drawing quick sketches down that you will refine later. I started the project off with a mind map. Josh wanted me to avoid a movie themed logo so I ignored the word cinema and went after the blend part.
The most interesting solutions I got from the mind map were the words steam, liquid and flowing. It was at this point that I decided to aim for a feeling of fluid, liquid like movement in the site’s identity.
This lead me first down the path of coffee mugs. The old logo was designed around the feeling of a coffee house and was intended to to look sort of similar to the Starbucks logo if I remember correctly. I figured this was the natural place to start although it quickly became clear that coffee mugs weren’t the solution to this problem.
I also originally did some movie themed ones that you can see on the same page as the first coffee thumbnail (don’t tell Josh).
In this next set of thumbnails you can also see my incredibly rudimentary sketch of the new navigation system.
My next step was to create digital thumbnails based on the first set of concept sketches. I presented Josh with some coffee mug logos, a bunch of corporate looking initial letter logos, and lastly a logo that incorporated a fairly literal solution: and actual blender. As you can see I utilized wavy, fluid shapes in all of the logos, trying to subconsciously suggest the idea of flowing liquid, something I planned on using as a cornerstone for the site’s identity.
Josh and I quickly agreed that the coffee ones weren’t working. The initial letter ones still looked a little corporate and plain, but the one thing that interested us both was the blender logo. We decided to try and balance out the initial letter logos as well as explore more options with the blender solution.
It was becoming clear by this point that the blenders were the strongest concepts. They had a fun style to them that mirrored the site’s own style of news coverage. We were both still hesitant to use the blender concept because it seemed like such an obvious solution. We had to exhaust all other options first. So I set to work on another stage of logos hoping to maybe resurrect the initial letter logos or to play off the idea of a blender in a more subtle way.
Here’s the next set of thumbnails that I worked on while on vacation.
These ideas used a much more abstracted interpretation of the word “blend”. When I got home from vacation I digitized the scribbled ideas into the following set thumbnails.
There were a few promising ideas there, but nothing that truly captured the fun, energetic style of the blender logos. It was decided at this point that we would pursue the blender concept for the final logo.
As I mentioned before I was interested in using the idea of flowing liquid as something that would give the whole site an identity, so when creating the final logo I repeated the wavy shape inside the blender in the background, behind the logo. We decided to incorporate this shape in the site’s graphics as well to give the whole site synergy. We also experimented with using different ghosted images behind the logo of each section of the site to reflect that section’s theme. For the movie section of Cinema Blend I experimented with both a film reel and a film strip.
The filmstrip was clearly the most awesome idea ever so we kept that for the movies section. The wavy pattern was reserved for the index page as well as more neutral pages like the site’s forums. After this was decided it was only a matter of modifying the logo for each different section of the site’s coverage. You can check those logos out over at cinemablend.com if you’re interested.
If you’ve stuck around this far thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope I’ve maybe helped you understand the work that goes into a logo or at least what my creative process is when I go about making one. Again thanks to Josh and Mike for all the hard work they’ve put in to the revisions as well. It looks fantastic, guys, and I’m proud to have been involved.
So what do you guys think of the final logo? Good, bad? What would you have done? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think!
- Matt S
