Logo design – country café
The logo
The brief
Logo for a country café popular with walkers and cyclists to be used, to start with, mostly on the menus. No expensive printing costs.
The café is named after Mam Tor, a big hill in the Peak District.
Inspiration
I first thought of creating a rubber stamp. Menus can be printed on the office printer on some chunky paper and stamped with the logo. Easy, cheap, gives a handcrafted feel and can be used on different items: flyers, loyalty cards etc.
In practice I suspect that the novelty would quickly wear off, or the stamp would go missing, and I’d be asked if I could provide the logo artwork so it could be printed on the menu.
Still, I liked the idea and it influenced the design. It suggested the shape, a single colour and the use of negative space.1
It would seem obtuse not to include an image of Mam Tor in the logo. Using it suggested the sort of embroidered badge a traveller might have once sewn to their rucksack. Also this suggested, along with the above ideas, a mid-twentieth century industrial feel.
Cliche
This aesthetic has become very popular with, I’m going to say it, hipsters. In fact, it’s such a cliche that it should have avoided it altogether. I have no excuses for not doing so and just hope the logo works well enough for the cliche to be excused.
I wanted to do something different to the sort of logos I’d been doing and there are things about this style I do like.
Fake!
The image above is a fake. It’s digital recreation of how a rubber stamp on rough paper might look. It might not even be an accurate fake. More of an idea of how I think it would look.
My original drawing is crisp and smooth, the lines aren’t breaking up, there are no white specks in the black parts, and vice versa. I added the imperfections myself, digitally. It takes more work to make this look ‘imperfect’ than it does to make it look ‘perfect’.
The comfort of lies
It’s a similar effect to applying an Instagram filter to a photo. You take a photo with your phone’s amazing, pin-sharp camera but then digitally distort it so it looks as if it was taken on a rubbishy cheap camera using film that messes the colours up. You do this because it gives the image some quality or mood that ‘perfection’ lacks.
This rough version does look a lot better than my original ‘perfect’ drawing. Perhaps the original lacks the irregularity of shape and (implied) texture and we find this boring. Or the rough version triggers other associations that we find enjoyable.
This is an interesting subject. I’m slightly against making digital things look like other things though I see that it often works. Think of an old man with an obvious wig – you know he only looks younger because his hair is fake but he looks younger nonetheless.