OUGD603: Capital North: Ideas and development

I took my research of the four cities, including the high speed railway, and started by sketching out ideas. I started by thinking about how I could build a strong identity, that showed the power of the four cities together.

Personally I don't like the name, it sounds like a radio station, but we have to work with what we've got given.

I took my strongest sketches onto the computer and began to digitally develop them:

I began with quite structured idea, i wanted to show strength and power.

I then thought about having the letters connecting up like the dots of a railway map:

I tried to write out Capital North in the same sort of style.

I wasn't liking this idea, it was a bit to futuristic, so I tried something a bit more colourful and playful. I thought about maybe having the ends of each initial ending with a colour, and each colour could some how represent the cities.

I tried adding a typeface to the logo.

I added shadows and shines.

I liked the idea of having the C and the N in grey, with the tips of the letter in different colours.

I then added the logo to an image of one of the cities, in this case manchester, to see if it would work over images. I really didn't like the outcome, and started to think that the logo looked a bit like a tv channel.

Here I took a different route, and took the outline of each city, and built it into a logo.

I wasn't happy with the logo, I think it looked like some sort of Spanish football tournament.

From here I tried a few other ideas that I'd had

I then came back to the grey logo i was working on and tried to develop it. It's always best to leave something you've been working on for a while and come back to it at a later date which I did. I tried cutting it up, adding other colours, and adding different drop shadows. I also increased the thickness of it.

I also played around with the shape that is formed when you link the four cities:

After getting some feedback from the group, i decided to strip the logo back and make it more simple:

To keep the logo linked to the four cities I kept the four colours, but made it much more clean and subtle.

I used the online colour swatch generator Coolor to generate different colour schemes that we could possibly used.

I then tried squaring off the letters instead of having them rounded.

After playing around with different fonts and colours I had the idea of splitting the N up. I found that having the letter split into sections left me with quite a strong concept. The area of C represented the population of Manchester, which is 2 million. The two bigger sections of the N represented Leeds and Liverpool which have somewhere between 400 and 700 thousand population, and the smaller section of the N represented the population of Hull, with a 200 thousand population.

I developed the idea and made it into some posters to see how it worked across each city.

After showing these to the group we decided that they didnt work, and the concept needed to be a lot stronger. I still took the idea and proceeded to develop it.

I then went back to an old idea, and tried to see if i could take it any further. I also made a GIF to see how it could work digitally:

At this stage our group met up and we had a mini crit of all our work. We laid out all the logos we'd been working on individually and tried to come up with a solution.

After the crit, we had picked an idea that we liked, which was Tristans, and we began to develop it a bit further, here is the developed idea that I produced. The guys from the DBA gave us some feedback and said they thought it looked to structured and corporate.

Whilst working on the idea I started playing around with the shape that links the four cities together. As was sketching on of the guys from DBA came over and sketched out a little idea and said maybe focus on the culture, finance, education and lifestyle, with each strip representing each sector: