BAKEWELL
As part of the DVB101 Visual Communication Design unit at Queensland University of Technology, the first assessment required us to create a logo for three creative briefs then choose one to expand and present. I chose Design Brief 2, creating a logo for a bakery for a new shopping mall.
Presentation and speech located after variations.
See below for monochrome and vertical variations.
See below for presentation slides and speech.
Hello everyone, my name is Jamie and I have created a logo for a local bakery business. I’m from Derbyshire, England and whilst the area is known for its beautiful scenery, the Cherry Bakewell tart originates from a town in Derbyshire called Bakewell. Which brings me to the name of the bakery – Bakewell. The name is suggestive with the slight pun that they bake well but it really gives the basis to the icon of the business. I was able to utilise a stylised version of the tart as a pictorial icon for the brand.
But before reaching the final logo, I needed to do a context analysis.
As the creative brief called for the business to appeal to a broad urban market, and considering my business was a bakery, I had trouble narrowing a target audience down to a particular group. I don’t believe that a bakery should be exclusive to any one people, and my design processes took this into account.
As a result of this a precise user profile doesn’t really exist. It could be you or me – a university student, it could be a CEO, it could be a factory worker, it could be a pensioner, it could be anyone. My user profile is simply any human being.
The purpose of the brand Bakewell was to provide a locally run bakery producing high quality baked goods at affordable prices.
The purpose of the design must demonstrate the quality; however, it must not ostracise people. A design too premium will lead to certain groups feeling outcast from the target audience of the business.
In starting my design process, I listed the following keywords that I felt needed to contribute to the overall feeling of the final design. And as I wrote on my slide, I know that traditional and contemporary somewhat conflict, but a big influence in my imagination of this business is traditional exteriors of those small, local bakeries that exist in towns across England and France. I wanted to draw inspiration from them, but also provide a modern application to this style.
Through research of bakery businesses, I found that script wordmarks were prevalent, presumably inspired by hand painted signs used in the past. Where there wasn’t script, there was still a welcoming, friendly appearance implemented with soft curves in the wordmarks as seen with Patisserie Valerie. I didn’t find many bakeries that used a strong icon as their sole or primary branding. As you can see with Bakers Delight, they use a combination mark and while I came across situations of the wordmark being used by itself, I didn’t see the icon alone.
Aesthetically, I took inspiration from minimalistic, flat icon marks. I enjoy these marks because of their simplicity and the utility they offer over a variety of mediums.
As you can see by my sketches, I’m definitely not a drawer, but I had a distinct visualisation of how I wanted this logo to go. As it happens I had adapted the bakewell as an aircraft roundel years ago so this gave me a position to work from. Starting with the traditional aircraft roundel shape and changing the colours to a pastry gold, icing white and cherry red, I attempted to change the proportions to better suit the appearance of a cherry bakewell. Although it was a meticulous process, I reached a point in which I was pleased with the proportions. I added sheared rounded rectangles and repeated around the edge of the circle to create the effect of the ridges of the tart. Whilst I was able to achieve this look by using 80% ink mix on the ridges, it proved to be a problem at a distance where the colour blended into itself and looked like a scribbly edged mess. It also translated pretty awfully when attempting to create a monochrome version.
I then played around with the typeface of the wordmark, trying to keep it friendly and legible, yet showing a level of quality to be expected of the baked products. Despite messing around with some serif and slab-serif typefaces, I decided that a script typeface would be the best pairing to give it the feel of quality.
Which eventually brings us to the final design in its default state, monochrome colourway, and various contextual applications. These include instances of wordmark only use as with the coffee cup, and a vertical combination used on the business card.
And so, we move onto the design decisions of this combination mark.
The final icon utilises the Gestalt principle of Closure by reducing the inner gold ring in size, leaving the ridges bordered by white space and visually tricking the eye into completing the circle. The cherry red colour is used for the wordmark, bringing an element of the Proximity principle by tying the icon and wordmark together as one. In the situation of a bakery’s sign above the shop, the background would also be the same icing white used in the icon, again including a flow on effect through Proximity. As a rotationally symmetrical form, the icon covers the Gestalt principle of Symmetry too. This means that if anyone were looking at the branding from anything other than its natural angle, the bakewell icon would still be able to identify the brand.
The combination uses three colours to keep it as clean and simplistic as possible. Firstly, the gold symbolises not just the pastry but an expression of high-end quality. And displayed against an icing white background, the inner circle uses a cherry red as a playful, sweet, eye-catching colour.
Moving onto the wordmark, Filmotype York was the final typeface used. It was chosen due to it being a smooth flowing script typeface, but I also felt it had a good balance of weight, legibility, and charm.
