Logo Development

For the advert to be convincing, the logo for the product is vital. I have taken inspiration for my logo development from commercially successful logos, as well as designs that I find interesting and strong.

Personally, my style is minimalist and modernist. This is something that ties in with current design trends, following the shift from skeuomorphism to flat design. The most famous design shift from skeuomorphic to flat is the Apple iOS design. Moving from iOS 6 to iOS 7, Apple introduced a new flat design across all native apps and home-screen icons.

With this industry wide transition to a new design standard, I will use this style in my own work. It also happens to be my own personal favourite style to design. Designers like Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky, and more from the Bauhaus movement are those that I find most inspirational, and can often be seen emanating in my own work. (For this particular logo it is less evident, however the design style for the rest of the animation will reflect this).

Another aspect that I have taken from strong logo design in the commercial world is the inclusion of iconography within the typography. Using symbols to represent the company either built into the name, or simply replacing it all together, has become common practice in recent design. Key examples are, yet again, Apple. Instead of having a well known logo containing the company name, the famous tech developers have the simple icon of an apple with a piece missing. Over the last few years this has become one of the most recognisable logos in the whole world, alongside the iconic McDonalds 'M' and the Nike 'Swoosh'.

Moving onto my actual design, the logo will use the previously mentioned Quicksand font in dark gray (#9d9d9d) with a lighter gray background (#d3d3d3). Rather than using binary opposite colours like the more traditional black and white, the blending of the similar grays will be softer on the eye, and allow for softer transitions in After Effects later on.

After a number of designs I settled on the style of logo that you can see below the URL. I then repeated the imagery throughout the rest of the animation, and animating the dark part of the 'E' to move as though it was blinking. Combining this with the capital L in the middle, the 'ele' looks like a face.

Sound Recording!

An opportunity arose to record the audio for the advert, with the help of friends and Audio Production students James Palmer and Katherine Campbell.

I took the script along to one of the recording studios here at the University of Lincoln and spent a couple of hours reading and re-reading various versions of the script. I recorded a few different versions in case I decide to change the script later in the development of the project.

With the files safely stored on a USB I took them into Adobe Audition where I could edit the sound to be exactly what I wanted, following advice from James and Katherine. Sourcing appropriate royalty free music was my next task.

First stop, incompetech.com. This site has a huge variety of sound effects and soundtracks that are royalty free, perfect for this sort of project. After a search through a range of styles and tempos I selected a track called Perspectives(.wav). The track is originally 11 minutes long, however I trimmed it down to the required 60 seconds.

After adding a fade in and out, I began cutting the voice recordings. Removing bad takes and any pops (we added a pop filter on the second take) left me with the best run throughs, which I then chopped up into each line and began constructing the dialogue with the best takes of each line, following the script.

Once all the lines were ordered and balanced, the audio was ready to export.

The next step is to begin animating to the track.