Process: Dream Ranch

Following the positive response we had to our earlier process post, we thought it would be interesting to continue the series with another ‘transparent’ project. However, to avoid this post succumbing to the notorious ’sophomore syndrome’, we have decided to cover a smaller project from 2008 but in greater detail: the exercise of designing a trademark for our Japanese agent Dream Ranch.

It is important to note that regardless of the project covered, it will always be difficult to present absolutely everything that informed our final design. It is challenging not only due to technical restrictions, but because for every quantifiable idea there will be some ephemeral factor that is either lost in the process or omitted for professional reasons. The delicate waltz between designer and client is not always appropriate to document.

Dream Ranch has handled Airside’s Japanese representation for over four years, and approached Airside to re-design their trademark to help increase their visual presence.

At the time of briefing it was clear to both parties that Dream Ranch’s logo wasn’t working hard enough. On consideration we agreed their existing mark failed at the first hurdle of logo design – it just wasn’t all that recognisable.

The graphic was fairly presentable and it had obviously done well (our Japanese intern Yoshi assured us the logo was quite unusual for the type of business it represented), but it didn’t posses many of the attributes needed to be identifiable and above all memorable in the market it occupied. The main concern was that the Dream Ranch trademark functioned very well as a graphic, but not as a logo.

The definitions and qualities that make a good logo have been endlessly debated elsewhere. It is certainly worth a more exhaustive post in the future, but for now we must at least touch on it in order to explain just why we thought the Dream Ranch figure failed as a logo and (more importantly) why it could work harder.

For a trademark to be successful it needs to surpass mere representation and gain a degree of ‘excellence’, a standout attribute that imbues either logo or logotype with the ability to stand out through visual noise.

Although ‘excellence’ can be seen as a bit of a catch all word for ’something cool’, the term is best referenced in Per Mollerup’s insightful identity book Marks of Excellence, as a way to describe a trademark that employs semiotic muscle to elevate itself above the boundaries of straight representation.

Mollerup succinctly summarised this through his ten ‘Kinds of Identification’: uniqueness, value, holding power, description, association, tone, graphic excellence, reputation, discretion and repetition. A successful trademark usually fulfils at least seven of these attributes (as some of the attributes work against each other), and is essentially why we talk of a logo ‘working harder’.

Excellence’ can be found crafted into most of the classic logos (take a bow FedEx, British Rail, V&A) and can sometimes develop from the most unexpected sources – Raymond Loewy’s logo for Exxon was a gift thanks to the inherent ‘excellence’ found in the name’s double ‘xx’.

In comparison, whilst not possessing a typographic flourish in the same league as ‘Exxon’, Dream Ranch’s wonderfully descriptive name provided us with a starting point full of potential ‘excellence’.

It was clear from the outset that the logo could easily occupy the territory of ‘dreams’ or ‘ranches’, so it is interesting to note how one of our first ideas ignored the name completely and attempted to represent how Dream Ranch worked as an agency.

Despite the obvious challenge of illustrating an abstract concept, we set out to create a graphic metaphor to describe Dream Ranch’s “draw for talent”. Bob Gill once referred to a method of “designing with noise” for illustrating the abstract, and while a geometric mark would have provided some solution we felt it would have been a tad impersonal for a company that prides itself on face-to-face business.

Our solution above solved the problem by introducing ideographic ‘bric-a-brack’. Both representative and, to some extent, noisy, the logo’s strong graphic runs parallel to an ever darkening half-tone pattern that symbolised Dream Ranch’s work. The logo felt representative of something being the product of many parts and its flying elements all fizzed with an energy suggesting excitement. On presentation this logo nearly went all the way, but fell early when the client started to see comparisons to a toy box.

Even after some furious tweaking to reduce the ‘toy box’ comparison, the damage was done and the logo had to be shelved. Thankfully on approaching Dream Ranch with our initial sketches, we were careful to cultivate a spread of ideas.

The logic being that of the Hydra – to lose one big idea provides space for two smaller ones to grow.

Amongst our early responses to the brief was an exploration of a bold letter ‘D’.

Although it had great impact, a single letter just seemed to lack the holding power a trademark should have.

Shown above are a number of shape exercises compiled from our early sketches that aimed to communicate the notion of ‘dream’ in as few strokes as possible.

These sketches all attempted to emphasise the ‘dream’ quality of the client’s name, and although slightly unfocused (the horse and eagle were quickly sidelined), one sketch proved to be the seed of the finished design.

Glancing over the rainbow’s arches it suddenly became clear that the arcing forms could easily be abstracted into initials of the client’s name.

In true Hollywood style the sketch on the right was scribbled on the way out the door in a snap reaction to the rainbow graphic.

Following that first scribble, it was a matter of chipping away at our vague notions of what was possible with this idea to create something a little more focused. At this stage we knew that there was an idea to use the initials of the client’s name – we just weren’t entirely sure how it should be done.

There was the obvious rainbow parallel, but by sketch number 4 the idea of creating a landscape had started to develop. Setting suns and nightfall seemed an appropriate precedent for ‘dreaming’ so we began to explore the different ways the D and an R could be contrived to form a landscape.

By sketches 13 – 15 we had started to think about the possibility of creating a trademark with a logotype formed from elements of the logomark.

To get our heads around the problem we presented the client with the above sketches to help visualise the solution. Oddly, at this point, we were intent on depicting the sun setting in-front of the hill.

It was important for the logomark to read both as a sunset and as Dream Ranch’s initials so many sketches were produced to try and pin down exactly how this could be drawn.

Some way into the sketches it became clear that there needed to be a degree of context for the logomark to function in this dual role, and consequently an ideographic ‘ranch’ was introduced in the later sketches.

At this stage of the project we were beginning to feel frustrated, as although we knew how we wanted the logomark to look, we found getting the right proportions for the logomark much trickier than we initially thought. It seemed that with every hand-drawn sketch we were able to capture a much nicer set of proportions to those we were creating on the computer, so after copious sketching and heavy experimentation with ratios we managed to hit some something that approached the beauty of those little sketches.

The inclusion of the ideographic ranch was also proving to be a headache. In our sketches it seemed to sit perfectly well on the hill, yet in practice this not only was a nightmare to read at a smaller scale, it seemed to disturb the logomark’s balance. To solve its positioning we looked to a typographic trick (white type is much easier to read on black), and punched its shape out of the hill.

With a completed logomark our attention turned to the trademark’s typography. Although we had an idea of marrying the logomark and logotype together, our numerous sketches of the logo with a hastily scribbled name did have a certain charm.

Thankfully we quickly saw sense and passed on these, and set out to find a typeface with initials roughly matching the shapes in the logomark.

Since the letter ‘D’ and its corresponding shape would always be rather similar regardless of the typeface, the letter ‘R’ proved crucial in the search for the right typeface. After a quick search through the various foundries we eventually found five typefaces that all possessed a broken ‘R’ that could be easily replaced with an ‘R’ of our own design. Although it could be argued that it didn’t really matter which typeface we went with, we felt it was important to find a typeface that already possessed many of the attributes we were going to end up with as a considered choice would make the dark art of inserting custom characters a whole lot easier.

With its strong uniform characters Avant Garde was eventually chosen from our shortlist, however Litera did get a look in thanks to its broken ‘e’, but our belief that this would compliment the broken ‘R’ proved to be incorrect as early experiments with two broken characters looked rather shambolic.

On considering how the logomark and logotype would work together it was clear that a straight pairing of the type with the sunset shapes was not going to work, the weighting was wrong and the ‘R’ could barely be read at any level. A contour-hugging option was also considered, and although this was favoured by some of the design team (as it possessed more of an overt relationship with the logomark), its terrible readability forced our hand for a punch-out version of the sunset shapes.

These characters were then typographically tweaked to match the line weights and tapering of Avant Garde giving a consistent pair of letters to join the set.

With the relationship between the logotype and the logomark solved, Dream Ranch’s trademark was complete. In our final presentation to the client the design team were confident the logo would be a great success, however nobody saw a problem that nearly sunk the idea and prompted a complete redesign.

All visual communication is subjective, and since design’s purpose is to act as a conduit for communication, anything designed (especially a logo) is wide open to interpretation. With trademark design ambiguity is not an option.

To explain Dream Ranch’s problem consider the image on the left: presented here are two classic graphic standards of ambiguity – the ‘glass half-empty / half-full’ and the ’sunrise / sunset’. Our Dream Ranch logo belonged to the latter.

Although they loved the mark nobody at Dream Ranch could tell whether the sun was rising or setting. This may not have been such a problem in the West since sleep and the sun’s transition from either night or day possessed a close enough meaning, but in the East the symbol of a setting sun is seen as a very bad omen. A company with a setting sun – is a company going out of business.

However, there was a solution – by applying a semiotic short-hand to an image some sort of context can be achieved. The images on the right, although containing the same base features, have had their contexts altered by the addition of the straw and the rooster.

Applying this thinking to the logo, we altered the logomark to feature a rooster instead of ranch. This change gave the logomark a narrative of a rooster announcing the dawn, and so set the logo’s outward representation of a rising sun. Thankfully Dream Ranch agreed.

On tidying up the trademark we came to an agreement that the rooster was too complex and clashed with the simplicity of the mark so as a final step the rooster was redesigned, and constructed out of a basic shape set to increase its readability at smaller sizes.

Also to give what could be a rather cold ideogram some character, an oversize eye was added along with slightly exaggerated features to help the rooster graphic maintain its shape at different scales.

With the sunrise/sunset question answered the trademark was completed and presented to Dream Ranch. Since this was not an identity project, no rollout was required – however Airside maintains a strong relationship with Dream Ranch and we hope to develop the ideas that informed our trademark design into a wider identity in the near future.