Media outlets unquestionably work to attract and maintain audiences, and the public perception of an enterprise is key for its proliferation. This is why effective branding is such a hot commodity. When professionals begin setting up a new enterprise, one of the most important branding components they should consider is the logo.
The mission
The Sports Journalism Institute has recently formed an alliance with the Missouri School of Journalism. SJI has been working to diversify newsrooms since its inception in 1992. The primary goal of the organization is to help women and minorities get access to jobs within the sports department of news publications. According to the SJI website, "The Sports Journalism Institute will bring its 10-day crash course in sports journalism to the Missouri School of Journalism beginning in June 2012.
To help celebrate this new partnership, the advanced magazine design capstone was given the opportunity to create potential logos for SJI, which currently uses no visual branding. Each student created 20 different logo concepts that were whittled down to our five strongest during a critique. We will rework these five, and SJI will choose one of them from the 100 logos submitted. The whole process is a really great learning experience for us.
The process
I found brainstorming logo concepts for this project to be challenging. The ultimate goal of a logo is to encompass the basic ideology of a brand (like a company or organization) in one attention-grabbing visual. The purpose of SJI is to infuse three very different components: sports, journalism and minorities. (The fact that they shouldn't actually be considered so dissimilar is exactly why the organization exists). Incorporating all three of these components into one visual required a lot of careful consideration.
In summary, I thought about how to represent advancement. This is why I worked with the idea of arrows and movement, which is intended to represent forward progress. I obviously worked sports into about a third of the designs. I also tried to use color in a number of different ways. So, these are what I came up with.
I'll go into more detail about the thought process behind my logos when I critique my five finalized logos next week.
You really have a great variety in your first set of logo designs... I love how you've played with color and several different images to pair with the SJI name – there are so many different directions you can take these. Looking forward to seeing how your final five turn out!
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, the logo and website you posted, awesome. You'd think someone was trying to design the worst and ugliest stuff. Ha.
ReplyDeleteI really like your logos and your representation of advancement by using arrows. They all look professional, and the colors you chose work really well. Great job!