Design My Night logo design from the cutting room floor

February 25th, 2016

Last year we were once again asked to work on a project for Design My Night, this time for their new logo design. We love working with the guys there so jumped at the chance. The brief was straight forward and for a brand we knew and know well. But it wasn’t that simple.

With any creative project there’s an abundance of opinion and subjectivity. In it’s truest form, our communication industry is based on people and their emotions. Therefore it’s hard to get something right the first time, and sometimes you might not get it right at all. And that’s okay. Uncovering what isn’t actually right by a process of elimination focuses the outcome. We’ve worked on projects before where you come full circle, where the end product has hardly any changes to the incumbent creative at all.

That’s what happened on this project. We were briefed to change the logo design from something they’d had for years to a logo to match their brand style that we helped to previously create. They wanted a logo that met the lifestyle of their consumers, their goal as a business, and also was minimalistic and thought provoking.

Fast forward to the final logo and in fact what they came back to was a simple change of font, colour tweaks and an added symbol, streamlining and modernising the logo they had in place. Whilst we may not believe the final outcome was the correct choice based on the brief, it’s correct for the Design My Night team as a whole. We’d come full circle from a brief that was focussed on external perceptions to one where internal perceptions and comfort mattered the most. They love the final logo design, they are proud of it, comfortable with the step change and sits well for their business. And to be fair, no one knows their business better than they do.

However, without this design journey we went through together they may not have got to their desired destination – that journey through many ‘wrongs’ to find the one ‘right’. Not only was it a realisation of how the outcome might be formed but actually how the initial brief evolved. It’s an important process to go through not just for a brand but for us as an agency. It’s an investigative process that we relish, whether right or wrong, but it’s in the failing that we find the biggest learning and development.

So here are our ‘failings’. Failings we’re quite fond of.