Logos are like cut flowers. They’re beautiful when you buy them, but then they soon degrade before being thrown out. Cut flowers have about two to three weeks of beauty before we throw them away. But what about a logo? Triton robotics had been using the same logo for five years. Our team knew we had to empty the vase.
Contributions: I created all the material in this project. My decisions were informed by team feedback.
Members felt that the old brand and assets were dated and didn't represent them. We decided that the first order of business would be to create a new logo.
Our club members needed a new logo to reflect our fun-loving group, to impress investors, and to bring in new fans as well as recruits.
To fit in amongst other robotics teams, our new logo would have to be simple, use no letters, and a maximum of one or two colors.
To help our brand stand out we explored different shapes, colors and themes that would communicate how our team is Professional, Energetic, and Cutting Edge.
After much testing we found that gears, circuits, hexagons, and ocean elements produced the best results.
It was surprising, but we found that symbols like waves were hard to capture and that designs with plenty of thin lines could resemble a math or chemistry club.
The chosen draft.
Polished and vectorized.
The colors were changed to fit official UCSD color guidelines.
From team members and graphic design peers I heard consistently that the logo needed to convey the theme of robotics, and become more "modern looking" via adding a repeating tessellation and monochrome color scheme.
The most organic. However, it suggests little about robotics and the duo chrome scheme is not the most modern.
The Sharp is more modern, and describes robotics by using slightly less organic shapes. The inner whitespace is regular and helps viewers notice the hexagon outline: a common shape in robotics
The Figurative is more modern but it also more clearly references robotics. The outer ring shares its shape with a chain link commonly used in robotics.
Our team chose to stick with "The Original" logo. Sometimes your iterations will not be used, but become sources of learning and confidence.