Direction logo
- Client : Direction Marketing & Communications Ltd
- Market : B2B
- Services : Everything, but not very often. We're mostly busy doing it for our clients.
- Web : you're already here dummy.com
- Overview : It's a bit quirky to add yourself to your own portfolio page, but it took 10 months to finally settle on the new logo design and a lot of argy-bargy in-between time. Working with a number of designers providing a host of ideas that were close – but no cigar, eventually 'if you want a job doing properly, do it yourself' as the old adage goes and thus a new identity finally emerged. And what's more – we love it!
When we set out in 1989 we struggled to come up with a name we agreed on, Alfa Romeo’s UK Marketing Director referred to us as ‘Two Boys and a Photocopier’ which was a very correct and astute observation at the time – and although we kind of liked it, we eventually settled on Direction. Our logo posed a problem then as it did again now 25 years later. We are like the decorator who cannot bring himself to paint his own living room, the gardner who just hates to mow his own lawn, so we asked a few external designers to come up with some ideas. Nothing quite worked but one talented Polish designer started using the Golden Design Ratio and this was the initial spark that moved us along to the logo you see now.
It’s not immediately obvious but the shape of our logo is based on an ammonite, a link to our local heritage and the Jurassic coastline, also the fact that we have been around a long time, but not quite fossilised yet. The ammonite shell is constructed to a plan, as is nature itself – by the greatest designer of all. Of course, we needed to do some tweeks and rotation to get to the ‘d’ shape, we also wanted colour and depth that wasn’t digitally modelled. So after a lot of painstaking bezier curves and combinations of shapes in Illustrator we finally settled with the logo you see. It works well at all sizes and as far as we’re concerned it’s just great.
As with all things, the eye of the beholder has the last word, one individual commented that it looked like a psychedelic coiled worm – I mean really – well actually…
Ammonite fossil polished up – got the picture?
An over elaborate demonstration of the Golden Ratio.
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