back in march I started a semi-collaborative project with Victoria Lee, a student at CSM doing her MA in Creative Practice for Narrative Environments. her specialty, and project, was architecture-based, so I was her graphics monkey.

so i thought I'd share the process for some of the aspects... it was definitely a lot of fun, despite some crazy hours and hurdles. I think I haven't learned this much about layout/presentation since I had to learn indesign to a relatively professional level in 2 weeks back in high school. plus, collaborations are great because you work with other people and everyone gets so much feedback from each other, it's incredible. I think I definitely prefer it to working alone.

anyway so this is about the logo. the project itself was called 'Olympic Terra' (later referred to as 'Olympic Terror', ha), and was about contaminated soil in the Stratford area, where the new Olympic park is being built for 2012. at one point I was over at Victoria's and she gave me some soil to muck around with (sounds weird but I'm sure there was a perfectly normal reason), and I ended up just doing some random stuff, too distracted by the television (we don't have one in our flat).


later, we came to talk about logos, and I remembered this stuff I'd done. it fit the idea we had in mind pretty well - natural soil, kind of has a 'handmade' graphic quality to it (because it was, eh), and somehow unintentionally I'd ended up drawing a sort of oval in the middle which would fit perfectly as the stadium that was in the middle of all of this, as well as symbolising the more straight-forward O in 'olympic terra'.

so I used some images and put together a logo base. it was time to pick the font. I'm pretty useless with typography but we came to the conclusion we wanted something eroded and earthy to keep with the key element of soil, while maybe adding a kind of documentational feel, like you'd find on old labels of plants and animals from the 1800s explorations. enter tuer's cardboard.
we also did a few more types to fit the 3 main chapters Victoria had set out during the project - contamination, bioremediation and architecture - so we could visually separate the chapters in the book, whilst keeping a general aesthetic going.

in the end, the logo was used in the book layout and was also laser cut (not really, more like burnt) onto some greyboard to use as the covers for the last 2 presentation books we put together. unfortunately I'm an idiot and forgot to take photos of them, but maybe I'll add them later incase I have the opportunity to see the books again (the deadline just over a week ago, they're gonna be kept till the exhibition in mid-June).

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