Having decided what I want to say in the content of my pitch, I now needed to design a slide deck to present with.
The first step of this process was to establish an initial brand. I want to a more extensive branding exercise further down the line, so this is mainly just something to get an initial feel and style a slide deck.
I started by grabbing a load of inspiration from old public transport posters and maps. I think bringing a modern twist of some of the ideas here could be an effective way to go as these are from time where there was real excitement around public transport and how it would revolutionise mobility.
Next, I started thinking about an initial name. I took some time and wrote out potential words or names to see what I would come up with. For the moment, I’ve settled on “Metronet” which I think incapsulates my idea pretty well.
After deciding on the name, I went looking for some font’s to try out. I knew I wanted something fairly chucking and black, which had a good italics to give the idea of motion as this is a transport brand. I quite liked “Zalando” as it had an extended weight that almost felt like train carriages or something. I decided to run this as and develop it up a bit.
I took the name in the chosen font and started playing around with it. I had the idea of these stripes that were similar to lines on a metro map, and would fit nicely with the italicised font. At this stage I was feeling the font felt a bit generic, so went to try something else.
I quite liked this font called “Zodiak” as it had a similar heavy feel with good italics, but the serifs just made it feel a bit more unique and retro, calling back even more to the inspiration I had looked at.
After some further exploration, I found the middle three lines could be brought in to fit with the serifs of the “M”, which I really liked. I also added a stripy texture to the background as I find having a texture to be really important to bringing the brand to life. The last thing was adding a tagline below, using the original “Zalando” font I had tried earlier. I actually think “Zalando” could work really well as a secondary typeface as it has tonnes of weights, and condensed, regular, and extended versions which will help with type on different size scales.
With the general direction established, I could now move onto bringing this into the slides.
I felt the slides with statistics would be an important part to get right, as these will really help to validate my idea. By using my initial branding I was able to visualise these stats in a more engaging way that just regular text. This was also useful to explore some potential visual directions that could come in handy later in the project.
