Design Practice 2 // Initial logo development

As shown through my Concept I am aiming to brand Viking Beard Ale around a more modern take on traditional Viking Hand Carvings and art work they used to decorate their buildings, boats and armor.

As the logo will be the main visual identity of the beer I wanted it to incorporate both a link to the brand name, the product and it's unique qualities as well as clear visual representations of Vikings so it can be easily recognised and associated with the correct subject.

When originally writing the brief to this module I intentionally named the product Viking Beard Ale as I wanted to create my own viking pattern that would act as a Vikings beard and this would form the main identity of the brand.

I initially started out by sketching some  different platted patterns as this seems to be what most Viking design was revolved around, extremely intricate binding and weaving carvings, they are really difficult to work out so My version in some what simplified and modified, to keep detail to a minimum so there would be no problems when scaling the logo to fit different sized products.

As you can see through doing this pattern I discovered that accidentally I had created a pattern which not only followed Viking carvings and platted hair but it also creates the Letters V,B and A which with a little tidying up could create a perfect logo

I seperated the Pattern into individual vector shapes to allow the weave to seem as if it were going over and under as a plat does. I used a consistent grid throught designing so it scaled evenly.
 

To help the lettering in the logo stand out more and become instantly obvious I used the shape builder tool to fill in the stem of the upper case B to help create some more obvious shapes.

For the sake of keeping it simple I have created a small vector illustration of a vikings helmet and face, I know when I was doing the research stage I found out tht Vikings actually never wore helmets with Horn on and this was a historical myth that now is the number one object that is associated with the vikings. However in the case of this branding task I want the logo to visually communicate that the product is mainly based around Vikings as this is a masculine message that needs to be portraited and I came to the conclusion that the horned helmet would be the most appropriate way of representing this. 

At this stage I am pretty pleased with the progress of the logo and I am quite happy I have been able to link the initials of the name, the link to Vikings and the link to beards all in one simple pattern.

To finish this stage of the development I finally just lengthened both the V and A element of the pattern to help represent the shapes of the letters more clearly.