It’s fair to say that our plans for expanding VentnorBlog and moving across to our new site, On The Wight (OTW), have hit a some false starts over the last few months.
We’re happy to confirm that development is now back on track and we do hope to launch the new site before the end of Spring.
So that leads us into our next part of The Journey.
You’ll remember in Part Five, we mentioned that Isle of Wight Graphic Designer, Shaun Cuff, had been working on creating a new ident for OTW.
Highly recommended
Shaun’s ideas, professionalism and attention to detail were second to none throughout the process and we’d have no hesitation in recommending him to anyone looking for a Graphic Designer.
Shaun works across print and digital and we’ve already had great feedback from those who’ve used his services based on our recommendation.
Determining our core values
Already a reader of VB, Shaun had an understanding of what we currently offered and took on board our plans for the future. He gave us the interesting task of putting together a list of the core values we associate with VB/OTW.
Several immediately jumped to mind, such as trust, transparency and honesty. After further thought, we came up with a long list which also included reliability, speed and inclusiveness as just some of the many core values important to the publication.
Armed with a brief, Shaun went away to develop some initial ideas. Before long, he came back with a batch of possible idents based on our core values and plans for OTW.
Round one: five options presented
Shaun presented five initial options, all in black/white to keep the eye focused on the actual design rather than be persuaded by colour choices.
Each had their merit in answering the brief, but none immediately jumped out ticking all the boxes.
However, that’s the beauty of the design process, it’s not a question of having to select a design from one set of choices straight away. Shaun was keen to stress throughout, that good design was about the evolution of an idea.
Round two: another five options
Listening to what we did or didn’t like in round one, Shaun came back with a second set of idents, some ideas completely new, others tweaks to modify and improve on the first set.
Some we liked, some we didn’t, but we were determined to explore them all and as Shaun had mounted each set of idents on boards, we stuck them up on the office walls for a few weeks, showing them to visitors and friends and seeing how people reacted to them.
We had our favourite, but felt it was important to get feedback from others. It was a worthwhile exercise, because pretty much all the comments cemented our view to go for the logo below.
Ticked all the boxes
We felt it met all our criteria. It’s neat, ordered, trust-worthy, efficient.
The speech bubble signifies the strong engagement readers have in commenting on the site (currently standing at over 62,000) and it works well at small sizes with the ability of being able to be applied over a wide variety of colour schemes.
We hope you like the ident too, it won’t be too long before you see it as part of the new site.
Read Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five of the VB Journey – taking you along with us, rather than springing the major changes on you unannounced.
