OUGD503 Roth Management

Roth management is a company which supports a huge range of artists and their work, ranging from fine art to design based media. They called for aspiring designers to create their new logo that embodies their ethos and expresses the "spirit of the modern day".

Since all that was being asked of participants was to produce a logo I chose this as a shorter brief, dedicating only a day or two to it. I started by doing some research into the artists the company supports.

I found that as Roth Management stated, the artists they support produce a huge variety of outcomes in their work. This could make it more difficult to cater a logo to a company that doesn't seem to be very particular. However, after thinking about it some more I found that this could give me the opportunity to experiment with using both hand-rendered and digital design methods.

I figured that since the company support artists that use such different media, by using different media myself, I could create something that would also correspond with much of what they do.

I initially wanted to hand-render some visuals, by bleeding together some different coloured inks, but found that this got much messier than I expected, and instead of the colours staying separate, a lot of the time they combined and created quite messy visuals.

I decided instead to create a watercolour effect digitally on Illustrator, and did so by making a variety of different size circles and creating a gradient from the outside, in varied combinations of oranges and yellows.

I used this same concept on a few different circles, and varied the opacity of them to make them appear more layered. I then gave some further consideration to the typeface, as I thought it would have to be one that would effectively be able to neutralise the aesthetic of the visual.

Below are a few variations I tried, using (in order) Bebas Neue, Lot, CF Paris, High Tide and Canter typefaces for 'Roth'. I wanted the 'management' to be somewhat of a counterpart, with 'Roth' having the main impact on the viewer, and so I set 'management' In Helvetica Neue Light.

I found that High Tide could have worked really well to encourage the idea of variety within the company, but when using the visual I had previously made it just seemed as though there would be too much going on. I wanted to go with a simple typeface that was bold enough to neutralise the visual aspect of the logo.

I decided I wanted to use Bebas Neue as this fitted the criteria I had set best. I tried some subtle variations with kerning and layout.

I chose to lay this over the top of the visual and show the text in white as I thought it would give it a stencil like appearance.

I thought that my final logo was quite versatile, and the colour scheme implies something quite fresh, which is a good representation of a company that supports current artists.

Although the brief only called for a logo, I had the time to mock up some business cards and letterheads at the end, to put the visual in context.