Design eye appeal is only one factor in the logo design equation. A useful logo for KittyCat Rehoming Wairarapa requires concept, great execution, and most of all, clear thinking.
How do I increase the eye appeal of my KittyCat Rehoming logo?
Use a picture, especially of a cat, or use more pictures, say an icon that is immediately recognised as a home. People relate to pictures of familiar things like cats instantly.
How do I increase the eye appeal of my KittyCat Rehoming logo? Use a picture in a way that involves the viewers eyes and their mind to perceive and process their visual input to complete it. A closed shape of a cat or a house, complete and stable, can be boring. An open shape is an invitation to become involved.
And while I am working with the pictures, sketching up the vector artwork for the presentation, I put a lot of thought into the best positioning statement to go with KittyCat Rehoming. KittyCat Rehoming which has the benefit of a name for the organisation that really requires no further explanation. Is there anything to add to that name that would support it, make it better by making it more appealing? A good positioning statement or tagline under the logo will be absorbed.
Then, after design and form there’s the matter of colour to consider, study and prove by testing because excellence comes through curiosity and discovery, it doesn’t come at the press of a key.
With no typographic contrast between ‘KittyCat” and ‘Rehoming’, an appealing colour combination is the only way to separate the logo words for easy reading.
Developing the colour theme for the logo in the design development and conceptualising stage is a demonstration of the method I use called “proof of concept.
KittyCat Rehoming’s logo aims to stir a specific feeling. That was a difficult undertaking that was achieved by a process of careful consultation with the client that together we succeeded in achieving.
It is my job as a designer job not simply to arrange elements aesthetically—as one would arrange flowers—but to organise information and spark interest from the audience.
KittyCat Rehoming logo design process
The first step in this project was adapting the business world’s most popular look to work for a not for profit community service organisation and to head up their brand new website.
Cropping this cat image from its photographic frame, changes it from a static block into an organic form and allows the readers eye to move outward into the space. The silhouette and jewel like eyes create a focal point, while her off-the-edge cropping, peaking around a corner appears timid and suggests that the rest the cat is there just beyond our view.
For a logo to work well on the web it needs to be bold, clean, uncluttered and impressive.
The basic logo business system consists of business card, website header and letterhead. It can be expanded to include any number of items: envelopes, mailing labels, packaging, signage, with-compliments slips.
This look can be used for all of it. At its core is the KittyCat rehoming logo or “mark” and a separate block of text.
Starting with the logo
Creating a unique KittyCat Rehoming mark is an art, an exercise in distilling a complex cloud of possible ideas—the humane and charitable rehoming service, the attitudes and experience of the trustees and founders of the service—to its simplest, most direct expression, an image that can be recognised and understood at a glance. The symbolic logo images presented were manually traced into vector format from google image searches and reviewing literally hundreds of photos of cats and houses then filtering those down to final few that are most recognisable and readily understood.
Set name’s text a separate block, trial a shortlist of several candidate typefaces
An important part of the clean, uncluttered look is the name set in a text block, that has the flexibility of either being kept either separate or in close proximity to the mark.
The design of the KittyCat Rehoming website makes the cats for rehoming the heroes of the page
The website in its first iteration is a parallax scrolling single page website where the gallery of cats who are up for adoption are presented in a tiled mosaic of named portraits and a bullet point bio, where further information on the individual cat’s back story is available by drilling down to each one’s individual gallery. So strictly speaking not all of the content is available on one page.
Credits
Web design/project management: MagentaDot Brands
Website content writing: Client
Content upload/site content management: MagentaDot Brands
Back-end support, front-end collab., project management support: nuweb designs
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