Olympics Branding: Case Study
In this post I’ll be going through the creation process of my logos for my HNC Graphic Design project on the Olympics. The brief for this project was to choose a country and city that has yet to host the Olympics and create branding for it. I chose to do Auckland, New Zealand for my project. Keep reading to find out how I made my logos!
The first step in my logo creation process was research. I did a lot of research about New Zealand as a country, about it’s people and wildlife.
I created small collages with some of my initial ideas. These featured kiwi birds, sheep, mountains, silver ferns and the Auckland Sky Tower.
After creating my initial collages, I picked out a few that I liked and created digital versions of them using Adobe Illustrator.
This gave me a better idea of what style I wanted to use for my logos.
Having done some more research, at this point I decided to do some sketches of some more logo ideas.
I looked at a lot of Maori artwork - specifically the designs used in their ta moko tattooing. I liked some of the ideas but I was struggling with not making them too detailed.
I really liked the idea of featuring the kiwi bird and the silver fern in my logos as these are quite iconic symbols for New Zealand.
My process for these was to just keep drawing over and over, trying to not be too precious about them, until I had designs that I was happy with.
I then started experimenting digitally on Adobe Illustrator with the designs I liked the most.
I also decided to play around with designs featuring the Maui dolphin as I would need two different logos in the end.
After settling on a design I liked for the kiwi bird, I tried to refine and tidy it up before experimenting with the colours, using those from the Olympic rings.
It was at this point that I shared my work with my peers to get some feedback on the designs. This is also when I decided to create a design for the dolphin that would match the kiwi better.
After receiving feedback and adjusting my designs, I experimented with my colour palette.
Originally, I had settled on a pale, cool-toned, blue. It was pointed out to me that this colour palette looked more fitting for a winter Olympics, while I was trying to design for the summer.
Once I’d settled on a warmer cyan/blue colour palette, my logo designs seemed to work a lot better. I decided that the Maui dolphin logo design would work best alongside the Paralympics logo due to it having a smaller vertical height than the kiwi design. The extra line of text on the Paralympic games logo helps to balance out the two logos as a pair.
Overall I was really happy with these logo designs and the branding that went alongside them for this project.
