360 Connect is a new venture for The Community Transport Company. The project requirements were to design a complementary logo that could be used alongside Community Transport Company's logo which has been around for a couple of years now (you can read about The Community Transport Company's logo design which we created here). The logo was to predominantly use black and white as the main colour scheme although freedom was given to be able to investigate other colours which could also complement the logo in the brand identity.
Initial design concepts were presented to the team (including a concept which was used in the final version). The original concept presented used a circular arrow in place of the zero which looked effective, contemporary and streamlined. Unfortunately it was very similar to an element used in The Community Transport Company's logo which we had redesigned a couple of years prior!
This can often happen in graphic design in general, where an idea or concept can look very similar to another logo in existence or in this case, a logo we had already redesigned! Logos which are designed to be very simple and minimalist often create this problem as when you start a logo design, often you throw all your ideas at it to see what works.
When you have something which starts to become aesthetically pleasing, you start to remove the "extras" or the unnecessary elements and features to provide a stripped back and refined look. When you finish this process, at times, you can end up with something which is similar to an existing design. It is for this reason, when designing a logo, we usually do not look at other brands in the same industry as it can subconsciously enter your head as a designer, and very often you get to a finished logo which can look similar to others.
We went away and came up with some alternatives to the original concepts we had designed, along with some new ideas which followed the look and feel of The Community Transport Company's existing logo. We then paired the new concepts with the existing logo to gauge which versions looked "right" when together. Whilst we tried a large number of different arrow versions, one which appealed to the team was a circular freehand design which gave the impression of movement and going forward.
We created the finished version and as we do with all of our logos, saved them in a range of different formats for different uses. We then created a Branding Guidelines document which contains the typography, positioning rules, colours along with a host of different concepts that could be adopted for future use across a wide range of different advertising collateral such as vehicles (including buses), membership cards, stationery, apparel and many more featured on this page.
