F64 is a photography store in Bucharest, Romania.
I consider their logo too crowded with both ideas and graphic elements. They use an "F64" logo and a flower which incorporates a stylized camera aperture as the flower head. Their motto "devoted to your passion" is added as well, cutting from the "64"element but its bottom is not aligned with the bottom of the "F" and of the flower stem.
I consider their logo too crowded with both ideas and graphic elements. They use an "F64" logo and a flower which incorporates a stylized camera aperture as the flower head. Their motto "devoted to your passion" is added as well, cutting from the "64"element but its bottom is not aligned with the bottom of the "F" and of the flower stem.
I used the crowdedness of their logo as the starting problem for a possible project. I asked a few of their customers (friends and people that I know) their opinions regarding the design of this logo. Most of them said that the logo looked outdated and crowded and that they would prefer a cleaner, simpler look. This confirmed my idea of a starting problem from an user experience point of view.
I contacted the store and asked if they would like a new logo design, offering it free of charge. They gave me permission to rework their logo design as a project for my portfolio.
With the problem identified, I started brainstorming how to streamline their logo while keeping some of the elements of their original logo.
I used pencil and paper to iterate my ideas. This process helps me visualize both the problem and possible solutions. It also helps to improve on the solutions by easily and quickly adding or removing small design elements.
The first step was to remove their motto and the flower and to focus on their actual name"F64". I started by simply writing down their name and then proceeded to make alterations to each element of it, starting with the letter F and continuing with the numbers 6 and 4.
I already knew that their name represents a photography aperture value and writing it down I immediately realized that an aperture value can be written in two different ways, both being used interchangeably in the photography industry. An aperture value can be indicated by a capital "F" or written as a ratio "1:". In this case either F 64 or 1:64.
Playing around with that idea and iterating it on paper, I realized that I can make a combination of the two. The writing of the ratio "1:" can make a capital "F" if the number "1" is designed as a simple vertical line and if the following colon ":" is placed a bit higher than the horizontal center.
Then I realized that if I design the dots as squares and the "1" as a thick line with square corners it would look even more as both an "F" and as a ratio "1:". In order to have everything consistent in my logo design I made the number 64 square as well.
After I got a satisfactory design idea, I used Adobe Illustrator to further develop my design and after a few more iterations and a bit of honing of shapes and spaces I got a satisfactory prototype.
The prototype needed just a few additions to it in order to get the final logo design. Those additions were to incorporate the company's original colors into the design: orange "F" and white "64" on a black background.