This is a project I've done for a client as a freelance graphic designer. Wokana is a company that handcrafts minimal bicycle racks designed for apartments and small places.
They are a startup and this was their first logo ever and they didn't have any idea and said that I have full creative freedom. as a designer I didn't have an usual starting problem from where I could start. That can be a nice thing from a creative standpoint but in the same time can make things very difficult without any guide lines. So I decided to ask them as many questions as possible to find out the core aspects, principles, philosophy, aims of their company. They liked my other minimal designs and asked me to make them a logo worthy of their minimal design.
problem - they would prefer a clean, minimal look.
After I had a clear s I started brainstorming ideas to make their logo less crowded but to keep their colors and some original ideas that became their trademark.
Then I started iterate all my ideas by drawing them with a pencil on paper. This process helps me always to visualize both the problem and possible solutions and also to improve on the solutions by adding or removing small design elements. In this case I started by simply writing down their main logo and then proceeded to make alterations to each element of it, starting with the letter F and continuing with the numbers 6 and 4.
After another session of brainstorming I realized that their name can be written in different ways exactly like an aperture value in photography, a letter F can be used or the value can be written as a fraction. Playing around with that idea and iterating it on paper I realized that the writing of a fraction as a "1:" can make a letter F if one would put the dots a bit higher. This allowed me not to only get creative with the main logo but also to come up with a solution for the main problem of having too many design elements.
To further reduce the over-crowdedness of the logo I decided to remove their motto and the flower which were either not related to their brand (flower) or was a repetition of the main idea of an aperture.
After that I realized that if I make the dots as squares and the 1 as a simple filled rectangle/line it would look even more as both an F and as a 1 followed by two dots. In order to have everything consistent in my logo design I made the number 64 as square as possible.
Then I took the design idea to Adobe Illustrator and after a few more iterations and a bit of honing of shapes and spaces I got a satisfactory prototype. That actually 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.
After I had a satisfactory logo design I made a few mockups in Adobe Photoshop