Logo design and development for Prioritise

Prioritise is a small business which was established in July 2007 and is based in Devon. It provides administrative, marketing and planning support to consultants and businesses throughout the South West. Managing Director Lucy Ash approached Eightyone Design to design and develop a new logo design and brand identity for the marketing and virtual PA company.

The companies existing logo was designed in 2007 by Lucy when Prioritise was being conceived. The colour scheme of red and blue was chosen to give the logo some character and recognition. The red was applied to the last two letters ‘SE’. As Lucy explained, ‘The SE being in red has been a useful icebreaker on many occasions’.

Logo design brief

We asked Lucy what she wanted the new logo design to say about the company and she came up with the following core values:

Professionalism
Reliability
Integrity
Quality
Flexibility

It was also discussed that the new Prioritise logo should portray the companies high quality, professionalism and effective business service. Regarding the style of the new logo design, Lucy supplied us with the following keywords:

Clean
Clear
Quality
Strong
Fresh
Neat
Instantly recognisable

As Lucy explained, the companies new logo design would be the initial step in producing a whole new corporate brand identity:

‘The new logo should include an element which could be used in other ways such as a bullet point for example. The new logo will form the basis from which a new style is developed for all future materials including web, business cards, corporate stationery, brochure etc’ – Lucy Ash

Initial sketches

We started where we always start any graphic design project, with a pencil and a bit of paper. Sketching allows us to explore ideas in a quick and effective way.

Initial logo design options

We supplied Lucy with the following three logo design options.

Our fist logo focused on the idea of prioritising to further portray the services offered by the company. The letter “O” protrudes from the rest of the letters pushing it forward emphasising it as a priority. This “O” could be used as a bullet point or icon for stationery etc. The “O” may also bring the same ice breaking opportunity as the “SE” in the current Prioritise logo.

The typeface is modern, clean and crisp allowing main focus to fall on the “O”.

Once again, this concept places further emphasis on the idea of priority. As you would star or mark an important item on a list, we used a hand drawn star as an icon. Use of this icon adds a personal touch and feel. This stresses the personal and dedicated services provided by Prioritise. This can, once again, be used for bullet points or an icon for stationery.

The typeface is once again very clean and simple.

The final logo design concept utilises the idea of communication featuring a shape / icon resembling a speech bubble. This serves to emphasise the companies skill in not only communicating with clients, but also communicating messages and ideas through effective marketing.

The speech bubble shape also resembles a ‘P’ for Prioritise and the text being split on and off of the shape once again accentuates the priority idea in logos 1 and 2. This also resembles the separation of the “SE” in the current Prioritise logo.

Client Feedback

After spending some time looking at the logo design concepts, Lucy replied withe following:

‘I have finally had a chance to make a decision. I like logos 2 & 3 but my favourite is logo 3 as I think it is more memorable and better portrays the company. However is there anyway we can get the ‘e’ at the end to finish underneath itself?’

Based on Lucy’s feedback some fine tuning was applied to the logo including the correction of the letter ‘e’.

Colour exploration

Lucy also sent us over some colour options she had been playing with (shown below).

She asked us to further explore and expand upon these. We experiemented with various colour schemes and supplied Lucy with the colour options below:

Final logo design

Upon seeing the colour options supplied to her, Lucy replied with the following:

‘The final decision on colour was easy to make as the 1st one works the best for me and retains the Priorise core colours – although there is nothing to say that we would not continue to use the other colours for other parts of the business.’

It is important when developing logo and identity concepts to ensure that the design works well in colour, but also works well in single colours on both dark and light backgrounds.

Lucy was extremely pleased with the final logo design concept. She commented ‘Thank you so much for the hard work you have put in to the design of the new Prioritise logo. I am extremely pleased with the final result and feel it represents the company perfectly.’

So what do you think of the Prioritise logo and identity design? Would you have chosen the same concept?