Creating the Manifesto Brand #2 – The Options

So we sent What Katie Does off with our concise yet comprehensive brief and waited with bated breath for what would come back.

(For the story of creating the Manifesto Digital brand so far see Creating the Manifesto Brand #1 – The Brief.)

We’d agreed at our face-to face chat that the first thing Katie would produce would be some mood boards to help us work out what we wanted our logo/colour palette to look like.

Katie worked up three possible directions for us…

Direction 1

Direction 1 was described to us as

“Retro/vintage inspired, a bit military which I guess suits the name. I can imagine you making a real rubber stamp for stationery etc 🙂 Quite textured and graphical, red/black colours.”

We liked this Russian constructivist-ish approach (and it’s bang on trend) but we’d need to be wary of making it look gimmicky/derivative. There’s a lot of brands aiming for this kind of look at the moment and we didn’t want to end up looking like a knock-off vodka brand.

Direction 2

Described as

“Clean and open, thin lines, lots of white space. Overlapping/transparent colours, icon type graphics.”

There’s still a crafty kind of feel here but we’ve moved from Constructivism more towards the Bauhaus movement. The clean lines/white space approach is very versatile from a branding point of view because it means your logo can be transferred easily into different settings.

Direction 3

Described as

“Friendly, a bit quirky/clever, maybe a visual pun in the logo somehow. Curvier fonts, more cartoony graphical style.”

We’re a playful bunch at Manifesto so the idea of injecting a little visual humour was appealing. On the other hand, we’re a digital agency – was there a mismatch between this style and the kind of services we deliver?

Decisions, decisions

I prepared myself for a lot of head scratching, second-looking and email back-and-forthing between three very opinionated directors.

Join us in part 3 to find out which option we plumped for…*

*as if you can’t tell by looking at the website. Still, a manufactured sense of suspense is better than no sense of suspense. So, drum roll please….