Purpose
The following design was created as part of the project for an organization named RacerX. RacerX is a gaming company focused on providing family-friendly, accessible games for people of all ages and abilities. The purpose of the project is to create a professional and comprehensive brand style guide along with a combination logo that includes a brandmark and a wordmark. Brand style guides are an important part of the design process when creating any content for the brand. It is essential that there is a set of guidelines to ensure that the brand is shown in a consistent, relevant way. A brand style guide ensures that everyone and anyone that is working on a project involving the brand can deliver a quality deliverable that sticks to the brand. A brand style guide is set of guidelines of how all the elements of the brand like the logo, color, and typography should be presented. Following these rules ensure that there will be brand consistency and cohesiveness when designing for the brand, for a more recognizable brand experience. It also better attracts and appeals to its consumers. Logo usage is the main component that should be outlined and visually shown in the brand style guide. This will ensure that the logo is used correctly and consistently throughout any project. Having the proper spacing, scale, contrast, transparency, and rotation ensures that the logo remains legible and consistent. The target audience of Generation Y, also known as Millennials, comprises individuals between the ages of 26 and 41.
Design Rationale
The logo created truly speaks to the brand and their target audience. The tachometer and the typography depict speed, intensity, and motion, which serious gamers enjoy and play games that involve fun and excitement. The tech-driven color hues align with the target audience’s preferences and help make the logo stand out with the glow effect. Many serious gamers have gaming set-ups that have glowing neon subdued hues of blue, pink, and purple and tend to buy and gravitate towards products that have these attributes. The typeface chosen for the logo is sans serif, which the target audience prefers and provides feelings of nostalgia. While researching attributes of the target audience, an interesting article was found on the Yahoo! Finance website (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/millennials-favorite-animal-reveals-key-143119222.html) that explains how Millennials’ favorite animal is the unicorn and how Icebreakers used a unicorn mascot to appeal to the target audience of Millennials. This article explains that unicorns represent Millennials’ values and how they spend their money and how it is a symbol of personal accomplishment, individuality, and achievement. This information was incorporated into the logo design with a brand mark of a unicorn racing helmet. These elements appeal to the target audience and tie in with the racer aspect and gaming. During visual market research, one commonality between the top competitors is a sans serif typeface in their wordmarks that are simple with thin to medium weights in size. From the visual market research, a limited color palette for the logo was created to mimic the competitors’ logos and photos online for gaming that include pink, blue, and purple neon colors. The logo is fun, light, informal, casual, family friendly, while attracting serious gamers. The logo created exemplifies the company’s mission, personality, tone of voice, and appeals to the target audience. This project shows skills in layout and publication design and designing a brand identity.
