I’ve just been playing around with ideas for my logo and font. I didn’t really like any of the previous ideas, so I just randomly decided to make a few lines of a woman and add it to the font. Not entirely sure I like the idea but I just wanted to attempt to make something that I thought might work.

 

I’m not entirely sure about this design; I feel like the actual logo itself is too simple and doesn’t quite convey what I’m trying to get across. It also seems a little too feminine. The font I quite like, but I feel like again it would be difficult to reproduce, and I’m unsure about the shade of green. I think perhaps I’d like to go darker, more of a forest green, to provoke images of prosperity and calmness that I’d like Fitnessé to convey. The shade of yellow that I used for the woman figure is also too murky and I think I’d like it to be more gold, with shades of darker gold to make it clearer. I think I definitely need to practise more.

I decided to start with looking at my logos. To get a rough idea of what I wanted, I took several pieces of paper and just sketched some ideas out, just so I could have something to focus on while I organised what I actually wanted.

 

To begin with, I looked at logo combinations with the font. I chose to incorporate figures into the ‘F’ of the word ‘Fitnessé’ because I felt it was more eye-catching and that it fit better with the overall theme of the gym; for example, it was easier to make the figure more flowing and feminine attached to the F, as seen in the top two pictures. Because I was also aiming for my gym to be about not only hard cardio and weight lifting but also focusing on yoga and relaxation, this felt like it would be perfect for indicating this to potential users.

However, I felt like the logos were too complicated and that if this was a real clientele it would be too difficult for them to reproduce constantly, and so I abandoned this idea for now.

Next I looked at maybe more of a focus on weights, incorporating this underneath the actual ‘Fitnessé’ logo itself. Although I did like the simplicity of these designs, I felt like they were too stereotypical and similar to what I’d seen before in my research, and so I chose to not continue with them.

The right logo is looking at the use of weights, but I was also just playing around with any kind of design just to see if something cropped up. I did look at using wreaths as an idea for perhaps victory, sort of reflected in the left hand logo, but I felt this was too similar to logos already used, a.k.a. the Fred Perry logo.

Finally, after speaking with Mike, I decided to look at women’s symbols and found that in many cultures the number three is associated with them, as well as the moon. The idea of three is usually indicative of the three ‘types’ of women: the maiden, the mother and the crone, which I thought was quite a good idea. The moon is obviously associated with the menstrual cycle, and so I just decided to play around with some ideas both reflecting the number 3 and the moon itself. However, I’m unsure about these ideas as I think they don’t look professional enough and that it doesn’t really fit with the look my gym is going for.

 

 

As an add-on, this quick design was a symbol I drew when thinking about the number three, but I’m unsure whether I really like it or not. I decided to put it up here just in case.

I decided to continue looking at more research for my brief before starting to draw or sketch anything out. Because I’d already looked at gym logos, especially feminine-based ones, I knew already what sort of stereotypical look most gyms used in their branding. I therefore decided to look at what most of these colours meant and how I could use the subliminal meaning of colours to determine the best colour for my logo.

 

I found this colour chart, which was incredibly helpful. I knew that a lot of gym logos used greys – if they were aimed at men – or pinks – if they were aimed at women – as seen in my previous post. Because my brief had identified specifically that it wanted to break stereotypes, I decided that I was going to avoid anything that seemed remotely similar to ‘femininity’, I knew I wasn’t going to use pinks or purples in reference to my female-only gym.

I did quite like the look of the greens or golds, which as seen above, indicate growth, healing and value. I feel like this would be quite a good idea to continue with because I want my gym to appeal to women but not to make them feel like it’s a same old gym that they’ve seen before. I also want to make sure that the visitors to the gym feel calm and relaxed whilst working out, hence the use of greens, but also to feel like they are in a place that knows what its doing, hence the use of the gold to signify prosperity.

Our third brief for the year focused more on client-based work; in other words, as if a client had approached us and asked us to do something for them. We were given six ‘clients’ to choose from, all with varying conditions, but the client that I chose was for the gym client, Fitnessé. 

To begin my research, I decided to first look at gym logos.

 

 

 

As you can see, many of these logos featured either flexed muscles or weights. They typically focus on strength, something that their primary audience are usually looking to gain. They also use a lot of neutral colours – excluding the greenpower logo, which is obviously green because of its title. I liked the simplicity of these designs, but I found them all to be too obvious, or too repetitive; there were many, many of these sort of designs and not much variation. Although some of them seemed quite clever – the use of the G shape in the God’s Gym logo, and the leaf-turned-arm in the greenpower logo – again, most of them seemed too obvious. I decided at this point that I wanted to try something that was simple and clearly referenced what the product was about, but that didn’t feature the typical stereotypes, such as weights or flexed muscles.

 

I decided to then look at female gym logos, as Fitnessé is an all-female gym. Again, there were many similarities between the logos that I managed to find. For example, the colour schemes were for the majority either featured pink or soft, warm colours such as peach — though, again, an exception of this can be found in Curve. They also used soft flowing lines for their font, as seen in the majority of the logos above, and a lot of them used a flowing silhouette for their logo, as seen in In Shape and FitHer. Although I did like the use of the flowing silhouettes, the overall result of these logos made me feel they focused too much on feeling soft and calm, in stark comparison to the gym logos in my first lot of research. I then decided that I would look at perhaps combining the two types of logos to create one that not only reflected on the femininity of the gym, but also broke stereotypes and therefore would attract a larger demographic, as my brief suggested.