(Photo copyright Bodek and Rhodes, Inc.)

Lorem Ipsum Logo Design

For the website, I had a few directions I wanted to go in, and my concepts were turned toward the act of driving itself (road signs, safety, asphalt textures, etc.) but soon it started to look very “elementary school”, with all of the bright colors and symbols. It just wasn’t working for the teenage-to-adult demographic we were targeting.

It happened that I was at the video store when I saw the cover art for the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, and that became a huge inspiration for the website’s theme.

Meanwhile, the logo I was working on hadn’t been approved as of yet, so I put a quick one in as a placeholder. Originally I had an asphalt texture and some Traffic cones at the top, with one tipped over giving a sense that there had been some activity there, as if a car hit it, like a student learning to drive. Neil didn’t really go for that idea, so I ditched the cones and decided that it was drawing too much attention from the content.

Meanwhile I was developing the real logo for the company, and decided to get rid of the asphalt texture in the header because it made the car logo look flat, like a sticker of the car laying on the ground. Instead, I decided to make it feel more like a showroom with a spotlight shining down to give a feeling of atmosphere and three-dimensional space around the car. The background looked plain now after removing the asphalt texture, so I took the diagonal line pattern from the body and put it up in the header instead.

But now the logo made it look like a car dealership instead of a driving school. So I went back into the logo and added some little traffic cones beside the car to symbolize a driving test and a set of car keys below the headline.

And wa la! The final website design was complete.

I’m glad he agreed; it was one of the more fun logos I’ve had a chance to do in a while, and I actually got to draw it by hand, since he wanted a more cartoon-like look for the logo.

He wasn’t really sure what he wanted, which can be a good and a bad thing when a client says this. Good, because the Canvas of Possibility is so wide and open, you can feel free to stretch your imagination. And bad <em>because</em> it’s so open; there’s no real initial idea for the designer to draw from, so you may waste time and money coming up with designs the client doesn’t like rather than pursuing what they do.

So it was a relief when he told me he wanted to keep the Red Porsche in the logo somewhere. Now I had something to work with. I found the clip art Porsche he had on the business card on another Driving School’s website, and knew it wasn’t a good idea to use it any longer. While I had no doubt that it’s just a clip art image floating around the net, it’s safer just to assume it belongs to someone and come up with your own. And frankly, it just didn’t look very well done, in my opinion. So we needed something crisper, cleaner, and something that looked like it was drawn by the same artist. What better way for me to make it look hand-drawn than to draw it by hand?

Like I mentioned in the 1st Class Website post, the logo looked more like it represented a car dealership than a driving school. So I added a couple of traffic cones to represent a parallel parking test.

I didn’t want the Cartoon theme to reflect in the logotype, however, because it was just too much. So I stuck with a sans-serif typeface, and chose Trebuchet MS after experimenting with a few. It’s web safe, and not a terrible typeface in print.

Neil also wanted a circular version of the logo for “Student Driver” window decals. I prefer the horizontal version, but this works nicely for space-saving.

And finally, the logo was complete.

But I took a deep breath and figured there just had to be a way to do it without using frames or tables, Javascript or Flash. And there was. And it was pure CSS. (Thank you, DoMedia!)

Lucky for me he had most of the graphic conception done for me already — he wanted the site to match his business card, images and all. It took a lot of the guesswork out of the conception stage. I wish I had taken a screenshot of what his page looked like before. It wasn’t bad, just kind of cluttered with information, so my goal in my design catered to organization and typesetting styles as opposed to fancy graphics.

Z Technology Services is a complete IT outsourcing services company that focuses on the unique computing, networking, and application needs of small- to mid-size businesses and non-profit organizations. I wanted to make sure the most important information was readily available to a most-likely frustrated client to get the help they needed, fast. So I took his Interactive Help link and made it a button in the top-right corner of the header and his phone number right below it so both avenues of assistance were easy-to-spot.