PixelMEDIA Inc.

PixelMEDIA recently launched cirrusvillage.com—an online community for Cirrus plane owners/pilots, and their families. While working on the design of the website, I was also tasked with creating the Cirrus Village identity. In this post, I would like to share the logo design process we went through.

As with most identity design, I started by sketching rough ideas on paper. What we needed to communicate visually was as follows:

• Flight. Not simply a transportation method, but a means to reach and explore new and exciting destinations.
• Sharing those destinations.
• Fun for the whole family.
• A welcoming community, respectful and friendly to new pilots.
• An online knowledge resource.

As you can see these are really crude explorations. I enjoy this part of the process a lot because a lot of interesting things can happen just by mistake. The faster I sketch, the less I think about what I’m about to draw next, which usually creates some unexpected results and happy accidents. You can see some of the themes I was going after; planes in clouds, duck family in flight, propeller-inspired pictograms, cockpit gauges etc.

Based on these pencil drawings I then started creating some “digital sketches”, which allowed me to explore colors, shapes, and typography.

Usually this is the stage I review with the client to get their initial reaction. In this case our client picked a clear direction, which helped me to focus on one concept for the rest of the project. The chosen concept was loosely based on a windsock, which is a cloth cone used to show the direction of the wind (you can easily spot it in both the hand-drawn sketches and the digital studies). The typeface for that option was DIN Neuzeit Grotesk (modified) which worked perfectly for the friendly, non-corporate look we were going after—lowercase, round forms, large x-height, generous counter, etc.

Both the client and our internal team thought the mark was powerful, yet friendly and fun. It depicted wind, flying, freedom, and community. We were all very excited.

For the next step, I started going through some iterations based on the windsock mark and the accompanying type. By smoothing out the curvature of the strands in the “sock”, the mark started to depict vapor trails from multiple planes converging toward one destination. I started overlapping the lines, creating some kind of a mesh, a piece of fabric with its loose end blowing in the wind. I also simplified the color palette, focusing on shades of blue and orange, which created a more unique, memorable look.

Here are the final logos. As you can see the mark got even simpler, therefore more legible at smaller sizes. I incorporated arrows (wings?) at the end of the lines. The fabric/windsock feel is subdued but it’s still there, along with the latticework made up of multiple trails. We kept the dark gray box with reverse type for the main logo, then created a version for white background and a black and white version for limited applications such as screen printing and embroidery.

Visit cirrusvillage.com to view the actual logo in use, along with other site imagery inspired by the identity.

Tags: identity, logo design, sketches