Logo design – classical music society

The logo

This is an entry for a competition I didn’t enter.

The symbol

The main event in this logo is the symbol. Using the shape of a violin’s ‘f-hole’ to represent the ‘S’ of Sheffield is an obvious idea. It occurred to me straight away as I was thinking about what I would do. That’s how I remember it anyway.

I was so pleased with this idea that I failed to look at other options and I let it have too much influence on the final design. However, it did mean I produced the logo quite quickly.

It’s obvious

An ’obvious’ symbol could be a boring symbol. It could also be clearly relevant and therefore easier to understand and remember. As a designer you do want to be mostly clever and original but this is not always possible and isn’t always what the design needs.

Background circle

On its own the ‘f-hole / s’ shape is too spindly and light. It looks weak alongside the text. The logo as a whole wouldn’t have much presence on a page or website.

So I reversed the ’s’ out of a background shape. I used a circle because, for unknown psycho-geometric (I thought I’d made that up, but as usual, I hadn’t)¹ reasons, it’s the best shape.

Colour

With just the dark background circle, the logo looked staid enough for an insurance company. I assumed that the society would want something livelier.²

The bright outer ring gives the symbol a bit of zip (like the jazzy lining of a dark suit). Blue was an aesthetic choice. The contrast between the dark and light blue is more striking than other tint combinations.

The text

If the logo includes a symbol the text doesn’t have to work so hard.

I decided that the typeface should have some link to the ‘golden age’ of classical music (let’s say the lifetime of Beethoven 1770–1827). This brought to mind two ideas: an ornate copperplate or calligraphic style or a typeface that was popular at the time (I was thinking Baskerville (1757), because it’s a good one).

The former might have worked with a digital font but a hand-lettered, modern interpretation of that sort of style might have been what was needed. If only I had the skill to do it.

Baskerville seemed too formal and predictable in this context.

I chose Gill Sans because it bridges the old and modern. It doesn’t pin the logo to a specific era but it’s still suggestive of tradition. Like Baskerville, it is based on Roman inscription. It’s also influenced many modern typefaces (it was designed in the late 20s/early 30s) and is still widely used. ³

It does tend to get used by organisations that are of the establishment but with progressive strands – BBC, Church of England, Penguin Books – which seems appropriate company for classical music.

See more of my logo designs here.

1. It’s impossible to be original these days.
2. This is where it’s useful to talk to a client, rather than just entering a competition and second guessing what they want.
3. It also has a nice ligature that is used here – ‘fyi’. This is drawn as a single character so the letters fit together more pleasingly.