Building the Convivio brand — Part 2

Here’s the story of how we went from brand ideas and imagery to our Convivio picnic bench.

Exploring our options

After our exploration work, Zach and Laura went away to generate logo concepts. The aim of this stage was to identify the visual concepts that felt like Convivio, and worked well in a variety of contexts. These were the initial concepts presented to us.

After a long session of chin-stroking and mulling, the most popular options were the roundtable (3A), the filled flames (5B), and the picnic bench (7).

We liked how the roundtable captured our openness and friendliness, but felt that it was a little abstract.

We liked the idea of the flames and how they were executed, but in some ways it felt a little too straight, a little too formal, just a little bit too uptight.

When we first saw the picnic bench, we were surprised. It felt different and a little “weird”. Having said that, the idea of having an empty bench felt a little odd, even though we couldn’t imagine how it would work with people.

The hand drawn concepts were nice, but we were concerned about legibility, would they stand out in a busy exhibition hall? The long table concept (8) was the least popular, it just felt too exclusive and unfriendly. Looking back at it, I think it was a pretty cool concept to represent how we work and our love of food.

A special shout out to the marshmallows (9) — the cutest snacks in the world! Too cute for us, unfortunately. They didn’t pass the “Could you walk into a client meeting with a straight face” test.

Converging

The next task was to take our three favourite concepts and figure out how to pick one to polish and perfect. To help us do that, Zach and Laura showed us the concepts in a variety of ways, and left it to us to hash it out.

Some concepts had more potential for animation. Zach and Laura mocked up a few examples to help us get it.

After some long conversations, we stuck between the flame concept and the picnic bench. The flames felt like they were simple, flexible, and warm. There was something just a bit generic to them, like they could be anyones logo.

Contrasting that with the picnic bench, which we felt was more unique and recognisable, but felt like it needed work in a way we couldn’t quite imagine to really work.

In the end, we went with the picnic bench, trusting Zach and Laura to evolve it into the final version.

Polishing the bench

Taking on some of our feedback from the last round. We were presented with a loads of different variations of picnic bench, fonts, and colours.

Even with all these options we weren’t perfectly happy with either of them. Our final feedback was:

We definitely are a fan of the straighter edged style (1) vs the rounded table (2/3). Having that back leg in there helps it feel more like a table

We struggled to decide which use of negative space works best: 1 feels a bit hard to see the where the left side ends, it feels a bit messier or harder to discern. 2/3 Feels like the closest seat is floating away. Having the back leg in there definitely feels like it.

We ended up with a combination of styles, in the lovely red colour and Galano type.

It’s been really interesting going through the process and seeing how Zach and Laura took our feedback on and how they reflected the brand back on us. It’s fun see how the picnic bench evolved.

Thanks so much to Zach and Laura for guiding us through this process and helping us get our brand identity off the ground. If you want to work with them, visit Superhero Studios.