I, Robot

I first met Jonathan Cusick, the owner of Digital Robot Software, at one of the Belfast Xcake developer networking meetings. I recall trying to impress upon some of these nascent developers the importance of employing good design and branding in marketing their new apps. I was pleased that Jonathan seemed to 'get it' as, a short while after the meetup, he contacted me to discuss creating branding for this new software company.

Jonathan specifically wanted a fun iconic robot image incorporated into the logo, of course being an ardent Sci-Fi fan the subject of robots is close to my heart so I had a lot of fun trawling through my favourite movies, books and comics while digging up the reference material. Robot icons have always played a huge part in mainstream popular culture anyway, and never more so than in today's world, so I thought this was a good direction for the creative.

I wanted to reduce the icon to the most recognisable aspect of a character (robot or human) - the face. An image of a face is powerful and, whatever the viewer's reaction is, the connection to the image is readily made and usually memorable. I was aiming for; 'Smart and fun, with attitude' - with the intention of showing some personality in the face element of the icon. I also had some fun in 'drawing' the face using numerals from the typeface.

I chose 'ITC Avant Garde Gothic' for the typeface, trading numbers for letters in a few instances, and editing some of the letterforms further to give the complete logo a more bespoke and geometric/industrial look. For colourways a fresh green matched to a muted navy blue worked well in defining the logo elements. These strong colours also make for a good reversed-out combination, very important for the likes of website mastheads (or any implementation of the logo beyond white stationery printing).

I really enjoyed creating this logo, I was happy with it, Jonathan was happy with it - and the robot looks happy about it too!

Update on Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 12:18PM by davymac

Jonathan pinged me on Twitter to let me know he has also posted on his blog about this design project.

Thanks Jonathan, good fedback like this is always welcome.