Case Studies

Graphic Design: Rebrand

Challenge

For this project, I had to rebrand a small bookstore. The Inspirational Value Centre is a Christian store in Ottawa. They sell books, movies, audio tapes, colouring books, and trinkets for your home. They are all about peace and happiness. My task was to create a whole new brand that really depicts the cheerful atmosphere of the store, while keeping a religious connotation. The store needed a more progressive fresh graphic identity.

Process

This project involved extensive sketching, and refining. I began with 60 very rough ideas that brought to mind the qualities of the store, using symbols representative of peace, serentity and joy. I focused in on 2 key concepts, and produced 10 different iterations of each concept. From here, 2 were chosen, and final concepts were presented. This process was really important to get every single idea down on paper. The final idea I chose was so far from where I started, and I could not have gotten there without going through this many iterations.

Sketches

Two Different Concepts

After I narrowed down my sketched ideas to two solid concepts, I created both of them in Illustrator. I made logo boards for each, with different scales of the logo, black and white, reversed, and colour versions. I presented these 2 options to the client, and they chose the one on the right.

Final Design

The negative space in this circle shows a dove, representing peace, and is a widely recognized symbol associated with Christianity. I chose a sans serif font to give a retail feel to the logo. The colours I chose are bright and playful. I picked these three bright colours so that they would work well interchangeably but to also be complimentary, and to stand out in a busy retail environment. My idea was that any materials designed could use any of these colours, ensuring the store had a good mixture and variety on signage, packaging, and product display. Business cards, for example, would be printed in all three colours and handed out at random. This colourful aspect of the brand really represents how fun and happy the bookstore is.