Although I need to pivot my brand, I don’t think I need to start over. What I took from my feedback was that I almost had all the right starting points, the complete brand didn’t feel like it reflected the parts enough.
I first looked at my last version of my brand guidelines, and picked out what parts were working and could be carried over. I felt the mission, values, tagline, and tone of voice, all worked well, along with the off white/black core colours, but they just weren’t particularly well used throughout the logo and application.
I felt the starting point for the pivot was to redesign the logo. When I got feedback on the last version, we identified that the lines from the logo where a good motif, but were just going in one direction. I wanted to focus on this idea and have all the stroke and ligatures of the wordmark run into each other.
I began by sketching out some ideas, and then moving to Figma.
My first attempts used an existing font as the base and extended the stroke into each other. I think because of the varying weight of the strokes it didn’t look quite right, so I thought about constructing my own characters.
I started with a simple circle, similar to the one used on transport maps to mark stops, and broke it into quarters. I set myself a rule of only being able to use an arc from the circle, or a straight line to construct letter forms. I continued this to construct the word “Metronet” which I then spaced and connected with ligatures.
I then extened all the strokes into lines that would fully bleed off the screen, making it appear as if “Metronet” was at the centre of all the different lines and networks, which was what I wanted to achieve. I then added colours, rounded line corners and more stops, as well as adapting the original background texture into a dot grid which fit better.
The final step was to reduce the height of the “M” which made it fit better with the other characters.
