Crazy Bat Designs - Helping you reach the most people possible: Blog - Anatomy of a redesign, Part 1: Corporate Identity

Blog entry for 5 February 2007

Anatomy of a redesign, Part 1: Corporate Identity

Written by Marco Battilana. CEO, Crazy Bat Designs.
Email: info@crazybat.ca
Web:www.crazybat.ca

I've had the same design since May 2004. I've felt no need to change this as I thought that the message I was communicating was effective enough. However, much like staring at the same walls in a room, I felt that a change was needed. So, I set out to redesign my site from the ground up.

To start with my redesign process, I broke down the site in the following aspects:

For this first part, I'll discuss my thoughts on how I came up with the new Corporate Identity for the latest iteration of this site.

Corporate Identity

The identity I had originally come up with was to communicate a simple message:

Helping you reach the most people possible.

To me, the image of the hand holding out the world represents this message. At the time, I was quite satisfied with it.

Revisiting this, I felt that the company could better communicate this message with a more effective identity. As well, I wanted people to think of Crazy Bat Designs providing this service and I didn't feel that the old logo, which looks very generic, would accomplish this.

I dissected the components of my original logo:

The hand: Representing what the company could do for you.
The globe: Representing who your audience is.
The name: Crazy Bat Designs
The slogan: "Helping you reach the most people possible."

My first focus was on the hand. I thought that the message was clear enough, but does it effectively communicate the message that the company is offering services that will help you reach the most people possible? Sure. But, who was offering this? The symbology was there, but nothing to connect it to.

At first, this reasoning lead me to the idea of changing the hand offering the world to an icon of an individual reaching out to the world. As well, I tried putting the globe on a pedestal and as an icon of an individual holding up the globe. However, as I was coming up with the different types of individual icons, I realized that this still gave the impression of being too generic and didn't tie the service of reaching the most people possible to Crazy Bat Designs.

Instead, I figured that if I tried to tie in some of the letters of the company name with the new logo, that there could be a better connection formed.

With the next set of sketches, I quickly realized that the lowercase C and the lowercase B, when drawn side by side, form somewhat of a circle between them. This, in combination with the globe, formed the logo I was looking for.

I decided that the name crazybat designs in the logo should be changed to the proper name of Crazy Bat Designs. As for the font I used at the time, I love Nine Inch Nails like the next person, but I figured that it was time for the Reznor font to go. In it's place, I decided on a font called Roxy. Created by John Downer, this serif font looked the best for my purpose. Not too whimsical, but still professional enough.

In addition, I removed the backwards lowercase R and brought the lowercase G back in line with the rest of the characters. At the time, my idea for doing this was to hint on users who dealt with dyslexia. However, I think I can communicate this message more with what I write about, rather than resorting to distorting text.

The slogan, "Helping you reach the most people possible", is still valid. It's the primary focus of what the company can do for you.

The result? Here's the before and after examples: