Young Authors Camp Logo Design
With my internship at NAU's Visual Design Lab, I was paired with a group to design a new logo for the School of English and their summer writing program. My design was selected as the final piece, so let me show you through some of the process!
From our initial consultation, the lead professors were wanting two different logos. Since the camp has a 8-12 and 13-17 separation for the classrooms, their initial overview was seeing the teen group as wanting to separate themselves as more mature/grown up. So my initial sketches were playing with the feel of Flagstaff, a forested mountain town, and the love of writing. The young camp going more bouncy and playful, with the teen camp having a bit more sophistication.
The professors ended up seeing too much disconnect between the two logos (in mine and my fellow group members). We all had the idea of crossing similar iconography or typefaces to unify them, but as we presented, we all came to this same conclusion. From this feedback session, we went to the drawing board, pulling the most liked elements from the designs to create one logo, just interchangeable text for either camp.
While I don't have my second phase black and whites (I will get better about saving those eventually), the most receptive piece of design was the different typefaces and the pencil tree. The logos were feeling stuck together, like the text couldn't breathe or exist without the icon, so I moved to a vertical layout. This allowed me to be more playful with the text orientation and how the letters played with one another, and kept with the ability to break apart each part to fit the application needs. With the camp being associated with Northern Arizona University, the university color palette needed to be incorporated. And since there was a lot of elements for the piece, I ended up following the full palette in a gradient to highlight each space as the tree grew.
And here are some example applications and layout ideas given for stickers, t-shirts, and more. It was a great learning experience to be going through the process with clients and as a team with these elements, the feedback rounds were great to go through and really helped push me to grow through the process.
