Initial Logo Redesign Process

Hey folks! Here's an exclusive first look at what we're doing with the new Chime logo design + a bunch of work-in-progress versions. Let me know what you think!

The first slide shows our current "final" design and I'm pretty set on this being THE ONE bar a few small adjustments.

My dad, being a full-time graphic designer, couldn't help getting involved in the process so we've been going back and forth for the past few days on it.

As for the journey to this point - my thoughts going into the re-design were that I wanted to tick the following boxes:

• Retain the original wind chime symbol in the centre

• Refresh the look of the logo to indicate the new musical style and separate it from the old one

• Help the logo seem "new" while feeling very familiar to the old design

The design process started with testing a ton of different fonts to see what might work and to help spawn some ideas. I landed on the "Cravend" font to use as the basis for the logo since it was suitably clean but very different to the previous font used.

The "M" became the biggest issue for the rest of the design process, creating a difficulty compromise between readability and fitting the font style and size requirements. As you can see from the iterations this was where most of the experimentation needed to occur.

We felt the more traditional "M" that closely matches the old design (4-6) was most readable but felt out of place with the rest of the font and felt like it made the logo lose character overall. We then tried using a series of "nodes" to glue the joints together between the main symbol and the rest of the type (7-10) and although this had the bonus effect of adding "sparkles" to the wind chime it felt a bit too busy overall.

11-15 saw us take different approaches to the seams such as removing them entirely to increase the readability of the "M" before landing on a thinner seam that allows just enough of bridge from the "M" to poke through and drastically help in recognising the character.

After some revisions of the type and vectorising my botched Photoshopped designs we landed on the slanted connectors you can see on the "Final?" slide. This seems to perfectly do both jobs of creating separation between the symbol and other characters + allowing the "M" to be super readable.

Overall I'm really liking where we ended up! Let me know what you think, interested to know how it looks to others outside the design process.