Logo Animation

Logo Animation introductions

Most common companies in the world, such as Disney, Sony, Pixar, Aardman etc, have bumper animations to help promote their companies. Bumper animations are short but precise to the point of the company's theme, for example, one of Walt Disney's home video bumpers, was of an animation of his signature being written, which then had his "mascot" Mickey Mouse along side it.


Walt Disney intro:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXCkH-kBHro&feature=related

Animation Tips:

http://donbluthanimation.com/tips.php?c=2&t=90

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8z2JaDtJvM

Bird Interactive Promotional Introduction

The idea for the promotion of my company, is to make an animation of a flying bird, which then merges into the Bird Interactive logo. This animation will be used for the beginning of my 5 minute pitch.

In using the traditional animation methods of layering transparent paper and following the Don Bluth tutorial, I was able to develop a Bird flight scene of my own.

Once I had animated the first 4 flight sequences, shown by Don Bluth. I then had to draw an extra 4 frames to enable the bird to land. I also had to make the bird drawings more round, this was so the bird would merge with my Bird Interactive logo. After I had completed drawing all the flight patterns from flying to landing, I took the drawings into Adobe Illustrator, where I then started the process of turning each image into a vector.

Bird Flight Sequence

Adobe After Effect

Adobe After Effects is an animating software, which enables you to create high quality movies. I decided to use Adobe After Effects, instead of Flash, due to it's animation flexibility and how you can easily create special visual effects.

I was shown the basics on how to use After Effects, by one of my university colleagues. Once I gained an understanding of the software I was then ready to start animating.

Final Bird Interactive Animation

Company Name Crit session

24 Nov - Group Crit session

For the start of the lesson, the teacher showed us some online examples of 30 seconds to 1 minute pitches presented by entrepreneurs.

For this session we discussed our individual company name ideas and were given constructive suggestions into how we could improve them.

People suggested to me how the overall theme of my company could be structured on the icon of my BIrd logo. For example, they said that the icon could incorporate well presented animations, using the bird, also how different types of birds could be used to distinguish separate products of the company, which would add an extra dimension to the overall theme.

Branding an Identity

Branding an Identity

One of the fundamental aspects for any company, is the branding involved. The brand should almost be a representation of the type of company it is, for example, the company Nike uses a tick to represent a positive and proactive attitude. Nike also goes further into creating slogans that co-operate along side their branding, such as using the phrase "Just Do It". The history of branding goes as far back to when cattle ranges used to scold their cows with a hot iron, that would be used to determine ownership of property.

Task:

Develop a brand identity for your company, which involves coming up with a suitable name, an icon to go with your name (however, this can be changed depending on whether you are using a typographical logo or not), and then a slogan or catch phrase.

Ideas and Inspirations
The first step to creating my own brand for my company is to establish the key elements(words) of the company and what each word could represent. I started generating ideas by drawing simple mind maps and doodling on an A3 sheet, to help get some ideas going.

Mind Maps

Through noting the keywords that are affiliated with my company, I was then able to start writing down company names. I find that coming up with names for products or companies is always the most difficult part, this is due to the endless possibilities and routes you can go down when thinking them up.

Branding Inspirations

The brands displayed in the image above, are logos which have always given me inspiration when creating my own brands or logos in the past. A lot of them use icons or symbols to help promote their brand, for example, Shell, Apple, BP, Adidas, Nike etc. However, it is interesting to see how typography has been used to represent world wide brands, such as Sony, Marks and Spenser, Disney and coca cola etc.

FedEx - A clever use of typography

I find that one of the key elements with any brand is the typography involved, for example, you can manipulate the type to work along side your business. A clever example is the FedEx logo, if you look closely at the "E" and the "X" you can see how they have used these two letters to create an arrow and as we all know, the company FedEx is all about moving forward or from A to B.

There are many companies that have been successful through the use of their icons, apple and Nike are the top two that have caught my eye, especially Nike, just because their logo has a lot of meaning behind it, which relates to what they are trying to promote. As for the Disney logo, this is a good example where a name has been used to represent the company, but also the name isn't just there to represent the man so much, however, it brings forth a theme of adventure and history of the company (for example, it was Walt Disney who made the classic characters, such as Mickey Mouse, come to life).

Slogans
Now the cheesy part of slogans. Slogans are another important aspect of promoting any company brand, if you look at Nikes "Just Do It" slogan, you can see how that brings forth the energy that collaborates well along side the message and theme they are trying to get across.

it is important to relate the slogans to the theme of the company. Just to recap, my company provides E - learning games for Interactive White Boards and other electrical devices. The Idea is to create a collaborative working environment between the teacher and the students through using a game to help simulate their learning process.

Here is a list of the slogans I have thought up so far: "Digital Enhancement", "Discover Learning", "Learning of Discovery", "Discover", "Exploring your Imagination", "Bring your mind to life", "Making learning fun", "Making learning interactive", "Bring enjoyment to your touch(or learning or education)", "Enjoy Learning", "The Interactive Learning Experience", "Thinking outside of the Book", "A Digital Adventure", "A Learning Adventure"

Out of all these slogans, the ones that i prefer are: "A Digital Adventure" and "The interactive Learning Experience". A Digital Adventure would be my first choice, just because the words that are used, such as adventure, bring to mind the idea of Games, exploring and traveling. Using the word Digital also gives people an idea to what field I am producing for.

Logo Development
After doodling on the A3 sheet for hours and generating mind maps on which names to use, I then went to a smaller sketchbook and started to refine my logo ideas. I liked the idea of using a bird as the icon to my company, at first I thought it was deemed cheesy to use your own name for a branding, but luckily, the word bird can be translated as either an object or as a name. Following Disney's example, I decided to stick with using the name Bird Interactive, or bird studios, Bird Digital, Bird Media... I haven't quite came to a decision on this matter.

Once I had started to finalize my logo in drawings, I imported the sketches into Adobe Illustrator, where I then started to vector trace over the image. Trying to get the curvature of the bird was a difficult task, because the one I had drawn, didn't seem to fit within a perfect circle as I had hoped it would. However, through using the alignments and using a perfect circle as the basic shape for the bird, I was then able to add in the additional curves for the wings and beaks, to form a well balanced icon.

Even though the image of the bird fits into a perfect circle, if you were to central align the bird in the outer circle, the whole image would look unbalanced. Thus, to counter this problem I have moved the bird just off the central position to the left.

Typefaces
After creating the icon for the logo, I then went into some research into what typeface to use. I started by looking at the typeface options that I have installed on my computer and selected the typefaces that I thought would be suitable. I also searched on a font website called Da Font, which allows you to download free fonts.

I also searched into what makes a good typeface and how best to utilize the styles you have. This one particular website covers 8 steps/ rules to creating an effective typeface.

http://designshack.net/articles/typography/8-rules-for-creating-effective-typography

This article also goes into the basic knowledge into how the anatomy works in a basic typeface.

The graph above shows the individual elements that make up a typeface.

I'm still unsure which typeface I want for my logo, ideally I would to prefer to develop my own personal typeface, just so the logo is more unique to others. It is very common for companies to use famous typefaces, for example, Marks and Spenser uses the same Helvetica typeface as BMW.

Current logo