Branding Practice - SPOT
This is SPOT.
SPOT isn’t a real service… yet. It’s born from a mock brief from www.goodbrief.io
Here’s what I got from goodbrief:
We are SPOT, a company that inspires new ways to stream movies by combining big ideas with ease of use. Our main product is an app you can use offline and impliments new creative technologies. Our target audience are millenials. We want to convey a sense of bravery, while at the same time being down to earth.
In this post I go through some of my rationale for the logo and colour palette I built for SPOT (check the palette here on coolors) then I generate a few ways to use the palette on the app.
Also, I’ve recently done a write up on the UX for SPOT (and streaming services in general) it’s big, but there are memes! Check it out here.
Logo
When ideating for the logo, I wanted to convey a sense of bravery or boldness, keep it creative, and still remain down to earth. Playing around with keywords I decided to shave it down to two: bold but approachable.
The target audience are millennials and this is a video platform, so I did an image search for “90’s TV Show Logos” for some inspiration. I found some big and splashy logos with odd-sized letters. I wanted to recreate the feel of these logos, but the target audience has grown up now so I want to make SPOT’s logo a bit more sophisticated and cleaned up to reflect that.
When doing my initial sketches for this logo I worked with triangles, circles and squares, but decided that constraining it to a square shape would make it look BIG even when small and fit well into any design work I do later.
The box around the outside makes the logo fill up the space looking full and confident. As a bonus, this shape alludes to television sets, without being a TV shaped box.
To give the logo more personality I inserted the sideways triangle. It’s a play button and also a homage to the shapes incorporated into the Saved By The Bell image.
The typeface is custom drawn, with inspiration from Impact. Again, bold! To make it more creative, fun, and approachable and tip my hat to the 90’s logos I varied the sizes of the letters and slightly overlapped them.
Brand Colours
When I looked at the competition, I realised that most video streaming services are using darker colour schemes- there is always some kind of heavy black. I wanted to incorporate this into my palette as a primary colour, but steer away from working entirely in black: SPOT is approachable, so most screens will be done in a lighter scheme.
My second primary colour is a very light khaki– it’s a neutral colour, not white, and calms all of the other accent colours.
My “secondary colour” will take centre stage in contrast to the two more neutral primary colours. It is a dark cyan as a subtle nod to the bright blues in my inspiration logos. It’s a more sophisticated and confident version of a loud and brash colour- the greeny-blue is both brave and down to earth.
My accent colours were chosen to pop off of all the other colours. They are pastel versions of bold colours taken from my logo inspiration. The bright magenta and blue are classic superhero colours, alluding to bravery. They also add creativity, and conflict to a palette that would be drab without them.
After I built the palette I created a few mock-ups of how it could be used in a UI to verify/show that everything worked well together.
NICE
This is all the work I’ve done defining the SPOT brand for now- but it’s not all I’ve done with SPOT.
I made a massive write up about designing the UX for SPOT, and film streaming services in General. I even included colourful pictures, GIFs and Memes for people who get bored by that kind of stuff. Check it out here.
Posted 29/6/2020
Other Blog Posts
Out of the dozens of photos I took, these are the best three I have from a 2-day hike to Hundstalsee. In summer 2019 my friend Marta and I made the trek to the lake. We’d seen pictures of it, and knew it was somewhere in Tyrol…
The Aran Islands are a collection of three barren, rocky islands off the coast of Galway. There are roughly 1200 Irish speaking inhabitants across all 3 islands. Fortunately for travellers, English is very commonly spoken on the Islands as…
Wintertime in Ireland can be especially dreary. The mornings are usually overcast and foggy, and thanks to the coastal climate the days are bone-chillingly cold.
In the winter of 18/19, I lived in Clontarf…
I finished school in late 2012 which, I realize now, was a long time ago.
A degree in marketing was something I chased out of a vague interest in the field. By the time…