1st Class Driving School just started and needed a logo and a website. Neil Berman, the owner, wanted something similar to a business card he had put together. He wanted a more cartoon-like look for the logo, to help make the company appear more relaxed and personable. There’s more detail on that particular job.
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.
