Logo design is hard for me. So, when I complete a branding project and everyone is happy, there’s much cause for celebration. I’ve just wrapped one such project – a logo design for Dental Wealth Partners. Seeing as things went so swimmingly, I thought I’d share my process and show some of the iterations and ugly step children I created along the way.
The Branding Workshop
One of the biggest roadblocks I face as a designer is personal taste. Whether it’s my taste, the client’s taste, or the client’s wife’s nephew’s cousin’s taste - individual sensibilities are incredibly difficult to navigate. This gets increasingly complicated the more cooks you have in the kitchen. The best way I’ve found to mitigate this is to get consensus ahead of time (from those who’s opinions matter) on what it is the design should accomplish.
The point of the branding workshop is to stir up meaningful conversation around the ideas about our identity that are just “in the air.” These are things we might never talk about if we didn’t have some tools to help us talk about them. Then we take that touch, feely conversation and tie it to the ground with some practical, pragmatic language we can sink our teeth into.
For DWP, the ideas revolved around partnership, trustworthiness, balance, and engineered or tested solutions. Wealth, sophistication, and health were also words that came up a lot. I took those concepts (among others) and crafted several iterations of this branding statement:
“Dental Wealth Partners offers complete management services for Dentists, increasing the profitability of their business and their quality of life at work and at home.
As a successful, caring, and invested partner we…
- Help develop a strategy where previous plans have fallen short.
- Incorporate a suite of integrated marketing and business services where expertise may be otherwise lacking.
- Implement sophisticated software that syncs practice administration and financial reporting.
We do all of this through an ongoing partnership that yields long term success.”
Round One – Too Toothy
I kicked these initial concepts out rather quickly. The thought was they were too campy. Anything resembling a tooth for dentistry was kind of tired. Fair enough, moving on…
Round Two – More Profit. Less Stress.
As I started into the second iteration, the team introduced the tagline they’d been working on. “More Profit. Less Stress.” I provided some examples, leaning on simple shapes and hard angles. This was better, but a bit disjointed and maybe a little too obvious. We also didn’t like ending with a downward angle. Life should be getting better, not worse.
Round Three, Four, Five, and so on…
Lots more iterations. These are really just a sampling. The one in the middle of the bottom row was what finally resonated with everyone. The team requested to see it as a solid shape and I obliged. The resulting object looked like a folded envelope, so I made some small adjustments. We all loved it until someone said the bottom right corner looked like an arrow pointing downward. None of us had seen it that way before and we were confident nobody else would look at it that way. Still, the gentlemen who pointed it out was a major stakeholder and, truthfully, ever since he’d mentioned it I could see nothing but an arrow pointing downward.
Additionally, the team felt it was important “Dental Wealth Partners” be on one line because each word held equal importance. It made sense to me, but how on earth would I cram such a long name on one line without making the mark obnoxiously wide like some of the other loser iterations I’d thrown out? The consultant in me put up a fight. I respectfully stated my case, but they still wanted to see it. Because it was important. Sometimes a designer’s laziness and pride masquerades as expertise. I humbled myself and gave it a go.
Final
I tried a handful of things to offset the arrow. Ultimately, rounding off the corner a
lot provided the desired result without affecting the mark too much. Originally, I’d chosen Prelo Bold for the typeface. A quick check for a condensed version and voila: the whole name on one line without breaking a sweat.
Share this on the twitter
