About the BC logo

Creating a logo is never easy. Here are some things to consider: it should look good in colour or black and white (you never know when you’ll need to make it monochrome to work with other colour schemes), it should still be clear as it is reduced in size (you’ll never know where you’ll want to use it), it should be distinctive and you want it to say something about your company. Ideally, that should be something good.

Faced with combining binary with culture we had a few options. Obviously, we had to stick to the more visual ones. We could recreate Nude Descending a Staircase in 1s and 0s. We could use the ying and yang. We could play off literary theory and think binary opposites. There was a brief Frankenstinian experiment combining a petri dish and the AI creatures from The Game of Life. We figured that we’d go for something a little more mainstream.

Choosing the Right Culture

When it comes to Western art there are few painting most famous than the Mona Lisa. We knew that once we had added the Binary component to it, chances are that Mona would still be recognisable. We also liked the fact that it was the work of Leonardo da Vinci, one of the age’s greatest inventors and scientists. We thought this would be just the right intersection of technology and culture to park our logo creation van.

On or Off

Then came the binary. We decided that we would call on the feel of the old 8-bit games. They have a distinctive visual style — which suggest numbers loosely dressed up as images. We then decided on how we wanted to represent binary. One and zeros is one way, but it doesn’t scream culture. Pointillism, on the other hand, not only has high-class, high-art connotations, but is just about as pretentious as impressionism managed to get, and everyone knows that pretention screams “culture”.

Putting it together

After a lot of experimentation, using different sized dots, using different parts of the painting and trying to focus just on the smile, a basic rule of logo design re-asserted itself: simple is better.

We used the whole painting, full length. That is how people are used to seeing it and it has nice, solid, basic shapes. Making the dots as large as possible while keeping those basic shapes also meant the logo could be used at a variety of sizes. By breaking the picture into two basic colours we also managed to capture the binary feel of on or off, warm or cold.

Choosing Colours

Selecting colours from a Pantone chart is one of the more amusing methods of giving yourself a headache. The colours matter; even if you ignore the semiotics. Chances are you're going to live with these colours in your workplace for a while. Do you really want to pick two colours that clash? They might get noticed, but what is it going to do to your eyes? Well, it turns out that we do like a little dissonance in our colour scheme, so we ended up with a dark blue (intelligence, stability, unity and conservatism) combined with a rich orange (energy, warmth, sociability and good health). I wonder what Foucalt would think that means...

Moving away from French philosophy and taking to those colours with a scientific eye, those hues also gave our modified Mona the look of something organic under a powerful microscope. This played on the notions of developing “culture” (think petri dish), which also fit nicely.

Wrapping it all up

As I said at the start of this article, creating a logo is harder than it seems. It has to look good, but also represent your company in a way that is instantly recognisable.

There are millions of logos out there and each one has a story. This has been one of them...