Logo - Digital Camera Manufacturer; ISO (fictional)

Class: Corporate Identity
Project: Create a logo for a fictional company of our choice.
Date Assigned: 8/30/2010

Basically what I'm going to do here is lead you through my creative process. The assignment was to come up with any fictional company of our choice and then design a logo for said company. I knew I wanted to do a digital camera manufacturer so I ran from there.

As part of my research, I looked up different camera terms (such as lens, light, image, photograph, etc.) and then looked up those terms in the thesaurus as to have other words to play around with. I liked the idea of the company name being an acronym for ISO because that so closely relates to digital cameras rather than film cameras. With this set in my mind, I looked for words beginning with "I", "S", and "O"... for obvious reasons.

I had my mind set on using something vision related like optics or optical for the letter "O" as I liked the idea of having camera technology in the name. I eventually settled with "Image Style Optics". Image, because that's what a camera creates. Style, in the sense of creation. And Optics, because that's what literally writes the image. So what I was left with was a company name that basically means, optically created images. Well there's two things that optically creates images: your eyes and a camera (The two often work hand in hand don't they?). So now I had a premise to base my logo on.


Here are my rough thumbnail sketches:

I chose to disregard any thumbnail that used film because as I stated previously,
ISO is digital only. I had strong intentions of using an eye in the logo. I had originally intended on using it as the O, but eventually through my research, I came to the idea of using the eye as a lens.

With that in mind, I digitally rendered a lens that resembles an eye in a sort of stylized way. However, it was round and eyes are oblong. I decided that the lens looked more like an iris and pupil rather than an eye. To solve this problem I used shapes around the lens to give the whole package a look of an eye. As well, the shapes give you the feel of turning, which is what the hand must do to the lens to zoom.

With a finished image logo, I didn't want to be without a text logo. Though the project was just to create a logo, I have no clue where it's going from here... Package design maybe? I know it sounds cliché, but I really do love Helvetica... well Helvetica Neue more than Helvetica. I worked in the image logo as the O for the word optics as I had thought of originally. Just for the sake of it, I developed an alternate logo that removed the eye shapes and stamped the name into the lens image (almost like the BMW roundel) and a quick logo that used just the eye shapes.


So what does this whole process lead to? Take a look.

And that's my finished product. I'm very satisfied with the results.

So that's a little insight in my creative process. I hope you enjoyed this, I will be going through my creative process for almost all of my own design that I post.

Thank you for reading. If you like this post feel free to share it.