OUGD403 - Study Task 02 - Yorkshire Sculpture Park Logo

With my course I went on a research trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. This trip was very insightful and I enjoyed myself. I saw many sculptures and exhibits, many of which inspired me. It was also nice to get out of the city and see the countryside. I was given a task to redesign the Yorkshire Sculpture Parks logo purely using shapes. So the research trip was intended t inspire, which it did. I found lots of sculptures and shapes that I liked the look of and wanted to experiment with when designing my logo. During the visit I took plenty of photos of things I thought would work well in my experiments. After the trip I looked through my photos and decided on what shapes to use. I decided to use a simple one-colour shape and so I traced many of the shapes I saw at the park and started to develop them.

So to begin with I traced a few sculptures that I liked the shape of. I tried many things, like rounded shapes and rectangular shapes. I felt as though none of these shapes really worked well and weren’t very impressionable or iconic.

Then I created symbols with distance. The sculptures that I traced were three-dimensional and I was able to recreate this using different gradients and a white stroke that almost makes it look as though it’s cut away from itself.

These logos worked well and the one I liked the most I developed further. This one I liked because it looks like a sculpture and I think it looks like the Yorkshire hills.

After having decided on this final design, I presented all of my ideas and developments to a critique group. This was very useful and with the advice I received I can develop my logo even further and make it better. May of them decided that it didn’t work so well scaled down so I might have to try a bolder stroke on the shapes. Another idea that was recommended was using colours with a lower capacity.

After my feedback I have thickened the stroke of my black and white logo so it is clearer scaled down. I also tried experimenting with colours and opacity, but soon discovered it works best in one colour. However after applying it to their website I discovered that both logos, black and a colour worked well on pages the others different so I have decided to go with both designs as many companies have variants of the logo on websites or merchandise.