Brain Tree Films: Logo Research & Revelopment

After researching the fundamentals of log design I started playing around with developing my own. As mentioned previously my other logo was cobbled together quickly due to necessity but has never been used much so  re-design will not conflict with any current company or brand identity. The design currently I very basic making use of a camera image and a bold font. the image is very traditional and a little flat which worked well with the documentary film website it was used on specially as the film was about a cinema projectionist. However I wish to try and look a little more cutting edge and contemporary as well as demonstrating a friendlier face and use more of the imagery associated with the brand. I am also aiming that the company will branch out from just documentary film into corporate, animation, music video, conference, art and also educational work. A logo that reflects all of these would be much stronger.

Due to the name and very visual nature of the company I started off with the obvious imagery to go with this. Film objects, cameras, spools, film frames, count-downs, projectors etc brains of various guises and obviously trees of various shapes and sizes. I started off by researching a great variety of these images on line and collecting a variety of these to look at and draw inspiration from to help me consider a variety of possible options try and decide the way forward.

Following on from this I started to develop my own initial ideas for logos. this was a stage where anything went and a chance to try out combinations of those images to make a logo. I did this with pencil and paper to work pretty fast. I wanted to not dive straight into photoshop but to play around with shapes and pictorial elements to see what might develop from these.

I used a combination of the images to see what worked. I started by using a frame of film to create a rectangle to house the images of combinations of brans and trees and then hybrids of these to create a Brain-Tree. I quite like these but they were very formal and static and not all that organic. Developing this idea further and using the shapes of the brain, spools and foliage on a tree. I was inspired by the more circular flow of the film countdown and used this alongside the more round shapes of the tree foliage, brain and a spool of film and sliced this up into quarters inspired by the film countdown. These are the ideas that I will take forward into photoshop to experiment with more. Presently I have not focussed on font and colour and will trial, test and develop these more in photoshop too.