blog
april 17th, 2024
creating a new logo and brand identity
Whilst looking for potential fonts for my website, I came across a typeface called ‘Honk’. When typing in uppercase, it uses negative space within a square / rectangle to make each letter. I liked the idea of having my logo within individual blocks as I intended to have each letter of the logo represent a different brand. I also felt it slightly resembled pixels from a screen (despite IMAX theatres not using pixels but the link is there for the average person if you don’t think about it too much).
The Honk typeface on its own is very stylised however and I wanted my logo to be more uniform and professional so I used it as a base in Adobe Illustrator.
I didn’t change much in terms of the overall design of the logo, instead making small changes that make the typeface more suitable as a scalable logo that can be used in multiple applications to represent the brand. I redesigned the ‘M’ in the logo to make it more uniform with the rest of the logo, increased the thickness of the lines between and within each letter, and added a thicker, rounded border around the outside of the logo as well as adding my new brand colours.
As there are 4 letters in ‘IMAX’ and there are 4 sub-brands to cover, I had the idea to have each letter of the logo represent a sub-brand within the company. I did this using colour, where each sub-brand’s individual logo will use the colour it is represented by in my main logo.
The intended effect of this is that once people learn what each colour represents, they will be reminded of all the different experiences / brands that IMAX offers when they see the main logo on promotional or company material; successfully bringing awareness and distinguishing the wide offerings that IMAX provides as the brief calls for.
As for the main typeface used throughout the website as well as in my logo for each sub-brand, I chose a typeface called ‘Bricolage Grotesque’ as it has a modern, playful look whilst still being very satisfying and legible at different sizes. I paired it with another typeface, ‘Lato’ which is more professional and contrasts nicely to give my website and other promotional material a more balanced feel.