New school assignment: Redesign a logo

After looking around in the neighborhood trying to find a logo I didn’t like it was hard to make a choice. It was not allowed to take redesign a logo from the store around the corner and they advised not to take a logo of a big company because that will make things more difficult. Well difficult is what I like because it makes you work harder and then you learn more and that’s the purpose of this exercise.

I was having trouble to find something that was worth redesigning till I came across a logo that I see at least one a week, and made the daring decision to use this log and redesign it.

The Schiphol logo was designed by Peter Wagner in 1978 and symbolizes a runway and the path of a plane taking off. The colors resemble the Dutch flag but the red is replaced for orange because that is the color of the royal Dutch family. The logo was redesigned by FHV BBDO in 1998.

Although this logo has a long history I did take the challenge to try to make something new

So the investigation started, the first thing I wanted to do something about was the name Schiphol. Yes it is know around the world and the people who know the name Schiphol also know it is the Airport of Amsterdam. The other fact is that a lot of people have trouble pronouncing this word, so Schiphol will have to go, I will not be using the word Schiphol in my new logo design.

After some word sketching a started to make some scribbles of my thoughts, and I ended up with triangle line designs that are overlapping in a way. Second thought was to try to makes something with the airport code letters (AMS) and I did try some designing on that but not to my satisfaction. The ultimate airport geek thing, longitude and latitude numbers with AMS or Amsterdam airport.

Some of them had the little thing I was looking for but is was not totally satisfied with the results, I needed to start digging up more thoughts. What is typical Amsterdam airport ?
That was the question I needed to ask myself, if I can answer this I probably will solve the issues of finding something nice. (at least for me)

One day walking around on the airport looking for specific things it suddenly hit me. We have a space problem in this country and this is also affecting the airport. Amsterdam airport is growing every year and they need to extend, more traffic equals more runways.
The first five runways that are relative close to the main gate are scattered around, not really organized from a static point of few. And after they created runway 6 this is what is looks like.

This distribution or runaways is so typical for Amsterdam airport I answered my question of what is special about this airport. I need to do something with these runway lines, so I hit my sketch book and came up with to variations. One it the lines as they are the real runways and one is the lines but curved.

Okay that line part was done, although I still had to decide the version I was going to use. After talking about it with school mates I couldn’t decide yet, so I changed my attention to typography.
This needs to be clear and easy to read (small and large) modern and timeless, first thoughts on this, Helvetica. But after making up a list of a lot of different options I decided to go for FF DIN

Now with this done it was time to think about color, I did a fast test on different colors to use as you can see below but I did make up my mind about that fast that I will have to be a red en blue, to stick a bit with the Dutch colors

Now the difficult task to make up my mind about the shape and position of the typography, I made this fast sheet and send it out to a lot of people asking there thoughts about what they like.

The first round was a tie between 4 and 9 but then with darker blue. With that I mind I did a second round with some adjustments and this is the final New logo of Amsterdam Airport.

A couple of weeks ago a colleague asked me If I could help him with creating a logo for an online shoe store. After having a talk with him the general idea was to have a simple timeless logo with something in it that relates to shoes.

After sketching some ideas on paper I finally came up to use a shoe print as the basic idea. This was exactly something they were looking for. I redefined the design till I ended up with a partial outline of a print from a classic men’s shoe. The font that Is used is a classic, Helevetica, timeless and simple, I didn’t take to much time ending up with this font, easy to read on screen and on print.

After presenting the final design , we decided to add a touch of color to the shoe print to give it a bit more impact. Now I’m busy making the style guide and finishing the business cards.

To be continued