I’m posting this on Sunday - day seven of my “create something” week. Friday, as always turned into a get-everything-finished-before-the-weekend rush, and my business partner at Type, John Xela, made a very welcome but unexpected trip down to visit us this weekend, arriving that night. And after the run of craziness that’s been my life for the last month or so, I’ve been slow on the blogging and catching up on some family time and where possible taking a sneaky nap here and there to catch up on some sleep.

But I’ve not been slow on the ‘create something’ task at hand, you’ll be glad to know…

On Friday, I came home a little early, having got everything I needed to do done, and threw myself into a little Illustrator work.

For well over six years (it might even be more like eight) I’ve been using the 3form brand to push a lot of the work I’m doing. That’s a long time to be using the same logo to represent what you do, and in that time (bar an update after about a year) the logo has remained pretty much the same.

So for a year or so at least I’ve wanted to make a change to the 3form logo, and my ‘create something’ project gave me an idea to make it happen. Well, to be honest it was more like “Umm - I’m stuck. I’ve been working really hard today and I’m tired. What do I have around that I’ve always wanted to do but never had the time.”

A good place to start for any potential branding refresh is in a good typeface, and with a name like ‘3form’ it comes down to a good typeface holding it together. The old logo was one that I designed from scratch without basing it on anyone else’s work, but because I was working quickly (John was arriving within a couple of hours) I thought a good place to start was Veer.

I must have filled multiple lightboxes with different typefaces and ideas, sketches in illustrator, etc. before settling on one - the beautiful Kari Pro. It was designed only a couple of years ago, which is more than can be said for the faces that are being used around in Birmingham at the moment for lots of high profile campaigns.

I thought about icons, about doing it by hand, about how the old logo is so _masculine_, about how the new logo needs to be feminine, inclusive, simple, light, not bossy, friendly… and I kept coming back to this simple implementation of Kari Pro Italic.

And I still really like it today, which is positive. Will I be able to live with this in another five years? I guess we’ll see.

Thinking back to some of the work that I’ve done that I like the most, there seems to be a shared theme in the factor of spontenaity. Good ideas come quickly - not necessarily after lots of focus group meetings and discussions. Sometimes, if it looks good and it says what you want it to say, “just go for it” is a good rule.

I guess I’ll leave it a few more days to see if I’m still happy with it. If I am, I guess you’ll be seeing some new stationery, a new website, business card, blah blah blah, appearing soon.

I’m excited, and best of all it feels like the old me back again. Identities can often take on a life of their own - I think it’s time I took the word ‘3form’ back to what it meant to me when I was VJing, designing flyers and generally experimenting with interesting stuff eight years ago.

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