Our friends at Gravitron are launching a new product over the next couples months and guess who’s in charge of the design. So we’ve been going back and forth over the past few weeks trying to get the name and logo for the product worked out. It was a fight to say the least. Which is something that I usually don’t have to deal with. I guess being my own client makes designing pretty straight forward. I make what I like. Well with this project there are a few more hands in the cookie jar and I’m finding that I have to justify why I think something should be a certain way. Everything turned out how I wanted though. So here’s the logo and also the logo assessment that I wrote to justify why this logo was the one. I’ve also included what the original logo looked like. The product was going to be called the V-tek, but we squashed that out and convinced all parties involved that the Helix was a much stronger name. I feel really good about all of this though. It’s a super cool product that you and all your friends will be talking about in the very near future. Until then, you can just look at the logo. Enjoy!

Helix Logo Assessment

The logo for the Helix is meant to convey a sense of movement. When placed on the piece the dots will flow towards the mouthpiece following the smoke. This creates a strong and memorable visual expericence. Legibility at all sizes is always a concern along with 1 color reproduction. These are the tenets of good logo design and this logo adheres to them closely. The name and the logo create a strong visual connotation of what’s going on inside the piece.

The word mark is strong and proportionate to the graphic element. The flowing dots of the graphic balance the text nicely and provide strong visual movement. The dots starting at the letter i unify the text and the graphic into one cohesive logo.

The revision of the text to a lower case font has solved the problem of the logo reading “heli - X” as it did in the previous version. The logo now clearly reads helix and is no longer disjointed. Also, the lower case e seems to be looking up towards the dot at the top of the i. This creates a interesting visual flow which carries the eye through the rest of the logo.

There has been some concern regarding the flow of the design on the pipe. While there is some visual appeal of having a design on the piece that starts out wide and narrows towards the mouthpiece, it should not be a deciding factor in choosing a design. It must be taken into account that this brand mark will be reproduced in many other forms (print & web). Altering the design to meet the perceived need to fill the top area on the piece would create a diluted brand presence as you would have 2 different logos. (1 for the piece and one for print) A logo that starts large on one side and narrows significantly may be difficult to reproduce at smaller sizes. The logo should be consistent across all printed material. This is not just decoration, it’s the brand name. Consistent representation of the brand is needed in order to gain a foothold in the market.

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