Better Than Half — A Logo Design
I was presented with a project three weeks ago: to design a logo for a new social media presence called “Better Than Half”.
The mission for this team is to simplify what it means to be above average. They attack this opportunity by forming specific challenges that allow participants to go one beyond the average. For example, a challenge may be stated like this: “Half of Americans read at most 5 books per year. Let’s read 6.”
I had a rather chaotic creative process for making this logo. Let’s explore.
Step 1 — Brainstorm sketches and develop a vector image
Coming into this design challenge, the founder briefed me with a two-pager specifying the mission, MVP (minimal viable product), and future considerations for the brand. With this information I started sketching images that came to mind when I thought of this product. Once I found a few ideas that I liked, I developed them into vector images.
These were the two concepts I liked the most, I decided to go with the one on the left because it gave more of a community feel which is important to the brand.
Step 2 — Explore color schemes & icon variations
The color blue symbolizes intelligence, purple symbolizes wisdom, and orange symbolizes community. The founder and I liked purple the most.
We then experimented with 3 people in the logo versus 5. We also experimented with different fonts.
In the end we came up with this logo. It’s a logo that would be expected to vividly communicate the mission of the Better Than Half brand.
Finished, right? Wrong! There was one more task left, show it to the rest of the Better Than Half core team and get their approval. One thing that I realized at this point — part of the struggle of creating a logo is getting the team to buy into your vision. In the future I plan on utilizing Adobe Photoshop and keynote to clearly communicate my process and increase buy-in rate.
Step 3 — START OVER
The founder presented my logo to the team, at first they seemed to approve of it. But a week later, I began seeing posts on their instagram using a different color scheme and without my logo! I was confused. Were they waiting until the official launch to present my logo?
It turned out that they had another designer on the team named Loryn who had a different vision in mind for the brand. This was her color palette suggestion:
I found out that the color palette used to make my original logo tended to make the posts look strange, so they decided to go with a different color scheme.
Another problem was that my original logo communicated the brand name a little too literally.
So given these circumstances, it was time to head back to the drawing board! This time with a teammate.
Step 4 — Speak with the founder
I decided to start again from the very beginning. I asked the founder, Jehron, a list of questions concerning this product.
Questions:
Why is your business here?
What do you do, and how do you do it?
What makes you different?
Who are you here for?
What do you value the most?
What’s your business’s personality?
This helped me get a better feel for his intended audience, values, and personality of his brand.
Step 4 — Create mood board
From these answers, I created a list of goals for our logo.
Our logo should: communicate an all-encompassing vibe, communicate the simplicity of improvement, and create a fun and motivating vibe.
I decided that Loryn and I’s best course of action was to create a mood board to help inspire new directions for this logo. We worked through Figma — using a combination of pictures we found from the internet that best communicated what we saw in this brand.
Step 5 — Brainstorm more concepts
We began sketching as many directions as we could from this moodboard. The most notable directions were the helping hands concept and the mountain concept.
Mountain — Symbolizes the journey of self-development.
Helping hands — Communicates that our brand is here to help anyone who wants it.
Step 6 — Modify original idea
After brainstorming all of these concepts, we found that none of them communicate the mission of the brand as well as the original logo does.
Loryn’s suggestion: We could simply remove the line from the middle person which would make the logo a little less literal, and it would also emphasize the idea of standing out above the rest — Better Than Half.
There was one thing left to do with this logo. We wanted to experiment with fonts and line weight in order to make the logo look more modern. After a whole lot of browsing on the internet and experimentation on sketch, we finally came up with a good logo — a middle ground between Loryn, the team, and I.
Final Product
The final logo uses the Rakesly font.
I learned a lot through this particular design process. I learned about:
- The usefulness of mood boards
- The necessity of communicating with not only the manager, but the whole team
- The use of third party font services to find fitting fonts for your design. (I recommend 1001fonts.com and dafont.com!)
I’m always looking for learning opportunities! If you have any project ideas or you’d just like to connect, you can reach me through:
