Brand naming, Logo and Landing page design : Dokito

April 30, 2011 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Article, Case Study, Design Industry, India, Logo & Corporate Identity, Projects

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I’ve always maintained that working with friends in a professional capacity is the best. The client can be persuaded and recommendations can be give with more freedom and swear words and the designer still gets paid what they’re worth. Oh, and the engagement yields great results as well.

What started with a re-design requirements for Media Redefined, which is a social media agency, soon turned into developing the brand for a new product they are launching. The change happened early on in the project and it happened over strategy discussions on where the company was headed. All meetings had all three partners, another friend who is a fantastic creative himself [ although Saurabh's more the writer kind ] and myself.

BRAND NAMING

The name that was finally chosen is DOKITO.
The name is derived from the Greek “dokimasia”, which literally translates to mean “test” in English. But we weren’t after the literal meaning and the derivatives and synonyms bring it back to our main keyword “analytics” and “to assay”. The other keywords were “social, measurement, media, tool, report,” etc.

There was also the consideration to keep in mind that the name should be snappy and new and young and should related to something on the web, without making it a typical Web 2.0 name.

The rest of the components of the word apart from the “doki”, are the Latin “ito”, which literally translates to “go wherever”, which we interpret as “travel / discovery” etc. which can also help in the name / brand story and helps connect with the logo that the app takes the client on a “journey” of discovery from confusion to clarity by delivering analytics reports. Without knowing the roots of the words, “dokito” also sounds like a “docket” or something to do with “documents / reports”, which is one of the things the apps does – delivers reports of social media analytics.

The Mindmap that was made for this brand naming engagement was the largest ever – I believe it shows how more and more difficult it is becoming to acquire domain names. Did a lot of searching!

I also checked for language variations and any negative connotations for all combinations in “dokito” and everything seems to be pointing to the positive. Doki. Ito. To. Dokit. Do. All good.

LOGO DESIGN

Since we had initially started with discussing the logo design for Media Redefined, the initial sketches were relevant to the letters M and R.

After these, we moved to Dokito and we had one idea, which fit in to almost all the criteria we had – visual, placement, layout, representation of meaning and we all loved it – atleast by the end of the process! It was the following image below, which had been brought up while working on the MR logo.

In these iterations we were trying various placements and typography and maybe better integration of the visual with the type.

I’d also like to mention that even before the client had given the go ahead on the name dokito as the final name, I had already booked the domain. The small $10 charge is nothing compared to when you recommend this wonderful name for a brand and the client loves and the client shares it with someone and then the domain is not available anymore…

I will also mention that the logo in these iterations, the logo visual is not optimized yet. That happened in Illustrator later on.

The last image above appealed the most to all involved stakeholders.

Further refinement to the logo and the design of a landing page, till the team launches the Beta – to allow visitors to sign on to receive notifications. They also needed a quick mockup of a business card to use immediately. [ We completely missed out on including the website url and email! It really was a quick requirement. ]

And don’t forget to signup to find out more about Dokito if you’re interested in social media – I can hardly wait for my beta invite – even as an independent designer / photographer or “visual identity specialist”, I am eager to finally find something I can put to use for my online presence. Thanks @praval and @gmishra and @honeytech ans @simple_sy

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Utplava : Logo Design : Case Study

April 30, 2011 at 10:43 am · Filed under Case Study, Design Industry, Logo & Corporate Identity, Projects, Redhu

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Evolution of the latest complete logo design project for the Utplava brand for Shefaly Yogendra. I’d worked earlier with Shefaly for developing a logo for another brand, Metacognita.

Shefaly has been one of the best clients I have worked with in my career as a logo designer. The design-world would be a better place if we have more like her.

Project Timeline :

75 days : started discussions & initial emails on 15th of July and final files delivered this last week of September.

Brief about the brand name & the creative direction :

Utplava is a Sanskrit word that roughly translated to English means : a boat, a leap, a channel for water. The boutique advisory and consulting business has been around for over ten years and has been attached to Shefaly’s personal name. It will now be separate from Shefaly’s personal name, hence the requirement of a new brand name. The brand name itself is unique and has rich meaning, which made the logo design & development process a little easier to handle.

From sketches to final logo :

It started with hand-doodles I scribbled – see all here.

I picked out three typefaces from MyFonts : Recherche, Origins and Sheila.

Till this point, the logo was almost finalized – one of the last three from above. But then, I had a dream. The dream was so vivid that I thought I’d shown those iterations to Shefaly. Then I started drafting this blog post and realized those iterations were not in the folder at all. I quickly mocked up a couple of versions – the two images below – and emailed them to Shefaly.

In the end, the logo we finally went with is this :

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