Final Version

After much agonising and tweaking I've finally come up with my final version. Logo's definitely aren't my strong point, a fact which wasn't helped at all by the difficulty of the brief and the short time we had available to come up with our concepts.

I wouldn't say I'm 100% happy with it as it doesn't really tell us that it's representing a food company and after I printed it out I realised that the colours didn't come out like they looked on screen. Te purple came out a lot darker and the yellow was much too bright, I'll definitely have to add some other colour to it, 100% wasn't a good idea. Rookie error.

Comparison

I'm trying to decide between these two typefaces. My criteria is for a simple san-serif typeface that will look good at full size but also be easily readable at small sizes.

The top one is Raavi, I really like the letterforms of the S and the E and the weight matches the logo well I think. The bottom one is Segoe UI. I'm not really the greatest fan of the S, I wish it would curve down a little bit more but the light weight makes it nice and easy to read.

Both of these options have their pros and cons but think I am leaning toward Segoe UI as readability is pretty high up on the marking criteria and it seems to be more easily read when reduced to 15% of its original size.

Works in Progress

Royal Bluebell

Here's some initial concepts using the Royal Bluebell as inspiration.

Floral Emblems of Australia

I've been doing a bit of research on Australian floral emblems and we have quite a few interesting and beautiful ones representing different states.

NSW: 

SA:

Sturt's Desert Pea

WA:

Red and Green Kangaroo Paw

NT:

Sturt's Desert Rose

QLD:

Cooktown Orchid

TAS:

Bluegum

ACT:

Royal Bluebell

I was originally thinking of using the Waratah but I really like the looks of the Royal Bluebell. The five pointed flower really appeals to me and I think it has potential.

The fact that it's my home state's floral emblem doesn't hurt at all either :-)

Moodboards

Last week I created a couple of moodboards that displayed some of the themes I want in my design.

The first one is the bee, to me the bee is the ultimate symbol of sustainable living, they are at one with nature and live in a state of mutualism with their environment which means that they depend on the plants they feed on as much as the plants depend on them to survive. It would be great if humans could coexist with nature in this way.

I really like the look of the honeycomb too, there's just something about the hexagon shapes that's appealing to me. I might try to explore that further when it comes to the packaging design later.

The other theme I wanted to explore was of the sustenance provided by a mother to her child. After reading the brief, one of the first things I imagined was a mother cradling and nurturing her child. I tried to capture what I was thinking of with this moodboard but I think it would be much too difficult to portray breastfeeding in a way that's suitable for family friendly packaging without doing it in a really abstract, stylized way, and i just don't have the artistic skills to pull that off.

Back to the Drawing board.

First Attempts

Coming up with good logo concepts is proving to be heaps harder than I anticipated. I always knew I was going to find this unit pretty hard as I don't think that logo's are really my thing, but trying to come up with something that represents healthy food, environmental responsibility and an Australian identity is a bit of a nightmare really. It's really hard not to fall into using cliches, especially when trying to make it look Australian. As tempting as it may be to use a Kangaroo, Southern Cross or Australian flag in my design, there is no way I'm going to resort to that. Nope.

I played with the idea of gumnuts for a while and was pretty stoked with how they looked at first but then when I came back the next day I thought they looked like rubbish. Probably a very obvious solution too.

Some early mockups of sketches I had done. I wanted to do something with Wattle at first  then switched to gumnuts.

Playing with my nuts