I just mocked-up some quick logo suggestions (given our short timescale, we can’t spend too long on the creative side). I’d previously downloaded some ‘old style’ free fonts from dafont.com for another side project (The Januarist), so it was fairly quick to cycle through these for our museum name, using Adobe Fireworks.
I chose a colour scheme from Kuler, trying to find something that reminded me of an ‘old’ palette, but not in the sepia/brown style; it had to also represent the ambitions of the future.
For most of the logo suggestions, I reduced the tracking and line-spacing, as I think a logo should feel fairly solid and ‘together’. I’m also a massive fan of the Hoefler Text typeface; it has a huge variety of styles (oblique, condensed, etc) which sit nicely together – hence my use of this in two of the logo suggestions.
If we’d had more time, I would have liked to experiment with a mixed typeface for the logo – perhaps a serif for ‘The’ and ‘Museum’, and a sans-serif (maybe something clean like Helvetica or Futura) for the word ‘Future’, to try to get a mix of old/new. I would also have liked to try being creative with the spacing and italics of the words: italics giving a sense of ‘speed’ (for ‘future’), and objects with space to the right of them being interpreted as ‘looking to the future’ (going forwards), and objects with space to the left of them are typically interpreted as ‘looking into the past’. I think there are things we could have done with this, given more time.
I also tried using a copyright-free ‘Raygun’ illustration in one of them, just to add an element of creativity (having not an ounce of artistic talent in my bones).
I’m not sure which (if any) we’ll use, but for the final version we’ll need to size the logo so that it’s in-keeping with our modular grid layout, which will probably be a 60 pixel unit grid horizontally, and an 18 pixel grid vertically.
Time spent developing logos: 25 minutes
Money spent: £0.00
i like the font on grey at the top of your blog best! and the in a day inside a circle is great.
i don’t think you’ve bettered that yet – j
I agree with Julie
What you have is better then what you’re thinking of changing it to.
Don’t muddy up your clean crisp simple that you already have .
Thanks both. The logo is actually for the output ‘museum’ website (the one we’re building in a day) rather than this website (which is documenting our endeavour). I take the point though – something simple and clean!
hi both,
it’s fun watching this develop, and interesting to see your perspective on what goes into a museum web site.
looking at these logos i can’t help but wonder: how much time are you budgeting for committee review and revisions?
so much of the investment museums make in their web presence isn’t about building sites. it’s about building organizational consensus.
/jt
Hi Jennifer,
That’s a really good point.
I don’t think we’re necessarily interested in trying to precisely re-create (or criticise) the ‘standard/current’ way of running these projects in large organisations.
We’re much more interested in showing what a ‘lightweight’ approach (both in terms of the software used and the size of team running the project) can achieve. Again, we’re not necessarily saying it will achieve the same sophistication or success of most museum sites, but it should be interesting to see whether we can create something that is ‘good enough’.
We’re all for ‘doing less with less’
Dan
hey Dan,
i couldn’t agree more about the efficiencies that come from working with a small team. there’s no way we could do Museums and the Web with anything like the overhead most professional societies have, let alone most museums
the fact there are only two of us mean that we can just GTD.
it would take a lot of trust for even a medium-size organization to give a major project to just two people. and since it will take more that two to maintain things in the future, involving people from the start is sometimes a good thing.
change isn’t just about blazing forward. we’ve got to enable others to take the next steps. showing there are other ways to do things is part of that, and that’s where what you guys do is great.
/jt
Hi there Dan & Mike,
Here’s another suggestion for the logo:
http://kkashifkhawaja.deviantart.com/art/Future-Museum-Logo-143432435