The original “FURY” branding project
Copyright: © 2018 FURY™ Designed and created by Jw. All rights reserved.
A review of the design I’ve done for FURY a few years ago. From concept, logotype development, guidelines, and some promotional materials. I’m going to critique my own work and try to learn something from the past mistakes that I’ve made. Let’s take a look at what I’ve done.
Note: Update in Progress
I’m feeling a bit nostalgic as I haven’t done any print design for quite a while. Looking at the works you created in the past might somehow remind you how bad you actually were. This is probably one of the “Best of the Worst” projects I’ve ever created. I shamelessly want to criticize it and share. It has to be done.
Background
The original plan was I wanted to gain more freelance opportunities. The best thing to kick-start is branding. What else could I do as a designer? To create a brand from scratch. Designing the logo identity and a series of promotional materials for a tiny-sized one-person design studio. However, it never was a thing. That being said, the whole project remains unused. This is one of the abandoned projects amongst many I’ve started.
This domain fury.hk was registered because of that. You see, now it’s a personal blog that no one visiting.
The project was “finished” in about a week. At the time, I wanted to pretend it as a design sprint project—to do everything as quick as possible. No time to waste, just make it happen.
To be honest, I don’t like how it turns out. I’m not satisfied with it at all. But you know what, there’s some bits I believe has some potential. Let’s see if we can learn something out of it.
Concept
The name Fury is short and memorable. This idea of Fury—the fuel of imagination, is to evoke a sense of rebellion. It was created based upon four keywords: tough, boldness, rebellious and courageous. I also create a tag line “Start From Nothing” for the brand.
The identity’s intent is to create a strong visual impact as well as to be easy to recognize with its unique personality. To communicate the message, some graphical treatments were applied to the logotype as a visual metaphor.
Designing the Identity
The brand consists of a logotype, basic brand guidelines for logo alignment, colors and typography. And some promotional materials.
Logotype Development
This is the most fun and challenging process. Design the logotype from scratch. I started with basic shapes of the characters and keep modifying them. The whole logotype development process took place at a Starbucks in an afternoon.
It was a simple and straightforward process. Starting from geometric blocks and adding details to each of the characters. As you might notice some of the iterations didn’t quite work and I moved on to the next. Making adjustments to the weight (thickness) and letter composition, trying to find the balance between characters. And by most of the time, the process will always look ugly. (Well, maybe the final output is also ugly.) I’ll never sugarcoat anything in the process.
The idea was translated into the bold and angled logo. The logotype "Y" uses negative space to create a thunderbolt as a metaphor — the fuel of imagination. Modifying the details of each character to bring visual consistency.
The identity was designed to be heavy and crisp with details that echo the core idea of the brand. The characters were drawn in stencil style, to have a raw and grunge look and feel. It was drawn to be more refined based on the sketches.
Some takeaways here for anyone who’s interested in designing a logo. Remember to create a “minimum size” for the logotype. Because a lot of the details will be gone if the logo is scaled into a small size. The shapes and paths have to be drawn clearly, especially points between corners. Avoid using strokes in illustrator and it’s better to “outline” path and edit it manually.
Brand Guidelines
For a start-up, I wanted the brand to be more professional. So, I’ve set up some basic guidelines for the identity. It took me quite a while for creating those pages. But it’s worth the time because the brand will be more grounded. Also, it’ll be much easier to apply those elements to the design.
I was trying to make the brand stand out with a tagline that goes with the logotype. The separator was angled to align with the logotype itself. Also, there should always be a minimum size for the logo. I believe that’s a best practice.
Defining the colors, typography and a monogram for the brand. Full color version with a primary color and secondary color. Logo on color background and on white. This is quite a standard thing for a brand guidelines.
When all this was set up. Then that’s where the fun part begins. Applying those things into a layout.
Promotional materials
Once we have the basic guidelines for the logotype. A series of promotional materials were designed to kickoff the project which also determines the overall art direction & looks and feel.
A flyer, a brochure and some badges were created. To create a strong visual impact that conveys the brand, I’ve put some effort into the alignment where text content was aligned differently.
The logotype is rotated to a vertical axis and text content were aligned horizontally. Both elements “crash” to each other creating tension within the layout. The way it aligns is to convey the meaning of breaking the rules.
Wrapping Up
That was it. I was trying way too hard to want it to be cool. It lacks of depth in the core message of the brand. I’ve only created one design direction for the identity without looking into other possibilities. I was so determined at the very beginning before I even started the project. I wasn’t sure about brainstorming for generating more ideas and iterations, but I was able to call that “finished”.
The part that I like most is I managed to create the whole thing in a week or so (while doing a full-time job). I translated my idea and visualized it from scratch. I can tell you I didn’t look for inspiration online like Dribble or Behance. It was completely original.
Everything that I did was supposed my intent. I am not satisfied with the project at all. But it is what it is. If it’s bad, it’s on me. Despite that, it was fun.
To me, the most valuable part was how I make it happens. The process of making things tells who you are.
I don’t think I can inspire anyone by writing this post. But if anyone reading through, I’d like to hear what you think.
I can take whatever you say, if you know what constructive criticism actually means.