This is a long post for those interested in the design of the Makerspace logo, and why I think it’s time for an update.
Feel free to skip the back history…
History
The Makerspace brand has changed a lot over time along with our name, the foundations of Makerspace are as Brixton Hackspace, who knows perhaps that brand might have looked like this:
When myself and Tom got involved it was known as Brixton Tinkerspace, it’s first semi-official logo was this:
Eventually becoming this:
Before that fateful day when we sat in the the front garden of the Prince Regent, literally a few hundred meters from the home of Makerspace and changed the name before incorporation as South London Makerspace.
Tom redrew the logo:
We realised whilst we were meeting at LCC that the yellow was hard to read on signage we had printed, so we changed the colour to yellow-magenta red and I redrew the logo using the free font Dosis…
The keen eyed might notice a very subtle colour difference colour difference, because we used #ea1d25 as the red to try and match the CMYK (0/100/100/0) colour originally for the web, however eventually that changed to RGB red #ff0000 to get the brightest colour:
The fun thing about this is that the reason for choosing yellow-magenta red is because on cheap laser printers it produces a really vivid red because it uses 100% magenta + yellow, this also makes the colour a lot more solid looking as there are less gaps because of the half tone used by printers to mix colours… So it’s nice that we’re using both colour reproduction systems to get the punchiest colours.
The only other subtle change that has happened is to change of typeface, we formerly used Roboto, but it often wasn’t great for large bodies of text, so the switch to Source Sans Pro has helped with that, it also happens to be a free font that closely matches the type face of the current M icon.
New Branding
The new website has been a long time coming, and when it does launch it will bring a notable change to the look of Makerspace’s brand, something the new poster design has already taken inspiration from.
The colour is off here because this was a CMYK screen grab and the colour doesn’t translate to RGB correctly.
The notable change here is the use of the M icon in the red box as a tab like design.
What have others done?
Arguably the closest brand to ours is Makerversity…
They similarly use red and an M shape all in one colour and have set a trend of other spaces (unintentionally I suspect) using a box type system of design which they use throughout…
Similarly Building Bloqs rebranded…
They reved their brand retaining the B with the box and updated the typeface.
Old design
Alternative use without the B icon
Time for a new logo?
The icon in the red box works where there is clearly something saying South London Makerspace near it, however the old logo that includes our name:
Feels to me quite dated, it doesn’t fit with this maturation of the brand and I think it’s time we changed it.
A simple change would be to simply replace the type, but I can’t help but feel that red is a little over powering with the text behind it myself.
Another option would be to continue using the same typeface as the M (I recently realised, I think it’s Gotham, not DIN), this new mark would is clearer and crisper, it’s a very quick prototype, but it could appear as white on a photo background, or black as it is.
Redrawing the M icon
The purpose of the huge red border round the icon, which has changed in recent years (making the icon smaller and more background) is to deal with social media sites which round off the logo into a circle:
However it actually looks substantially better than it did as a result…
The problem is the icon is quite detailed, I am not one for suggesting we remove the detail, but it has been redrawn repeatedly in the past due to scaling probles…
Favicon:
Discourse:
Also the new membership system…
The problem is the lines aren’t on a square grid, so as you scale down the logo becomes more and more distorted…
It’s only around 75-100 pixels it starts to become clear again, but the slot on the right is still blurry.
What is more the logo isn’t square, but extremely close to it… This isn’t a huge issue, but it has presented problems in the past. it’s 1:1.072 ratio.
On pixel scale that means 100px X 107.229px
I am proposing that we square the logo up and draw it at the smallest possible size to ensure that as it scales up the logo looks good, but it also works with fine detail at small sizes, in a similar way to the redrawn one for the membership system, you’ll note there are more ticks on the ruler in that version because they’ve been snapped to a pixel grid rather than places evenly across…
With a little more work we could square up this logo and combined with the new text have something fresh to move forward with.
What do people think, I know a number of people won’t care, and people always object to design change, it’s become known as the Facebook effect amongst designers…
Feel free to chip in feedback on the sketch logo above, or even do your own.
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