My critique feedback mainly surrounded a disconnect between my colour palette below, and the values, mission statement and brand story.
When I looked at colour and picking an appropriate colour palette for my brand, I had not got as clear a view on what my brand stood for and represented. Therefore I selected a safe colour palette and one that you would often see in the banking sector, a selection of blues with a gold accent colour. While these colours are very visually appealing and work very well together, as my brand developed they were no longer suitable. I had been concentrating on getting all of the elements of my brand together and as the colours looked good when paired together I had not noticed an issue.
However as the brand developed with the name FUTR and I developed a brand that was not in line with traditional banks with ideas of sustainability and using recycled materials, putting accessibility to the fore, as well as looking at alternatives to traditional bank branches having a traditional bank/financial sector colour palette no longer made sense. This was especially true now I had decided on my final logomark design. This had been something I had struggled with during this project and I have been through many iterations and experiments trying to come up with the right solution.
My final solution was to give my logomark a sense of forward movement and progress, fitting in perfectly with my value of innovation and dreams. This meant that the colour palette was no longer in touch with this forward thinking and innovative brand I had developed.
This was hard feedback to hear as I had spent a lot of time with this colour palette and creating mock-up applications within it, as you can see in my brand style tile below. However I could perfectly understand the reason behind the feedback and through a lot of thinking and consideration, I have decided that changing my colour palette at this stage is the right decision. I think there is a more suitable colour palette out there that can better represent my brand. It can do this by injecting some excitement and interest into the brand, by stepping it away from traditional financial brand territory allowing it to stand out among all the other bank brands.
While I totally agreed with the feedback surrounding my colour palette, I di receive some feedback on my typographic choice and its use in my logomark. The piece of feedback suggested it did not look like a typeface of a bank, and I can see what was meant, but for me the typeface represents this bank, not other banks, they may use different typefaces, ones that are maybe not as bold or strong in their forms. However, I feel when you have a name like FUTR and the values and mission I have with this brand. A very strong bold typeface does work and offers a point of separation from other brands. In a way this backed up the need to make a change in my colour palette, I was creating a confusing brand picture, with a very non-banking typeface and modern values but a very traditional and common banking colour palette. I needed to find a colour palette that matched the typeface and the mission rather than change my typeface to match the colour palette.
A final piece of feedback I received was that my abstract Earth logo could be confusing, with my lecturer commenting it took him a minute to grasp what it was. I had felt this was a good idea avoiding a too obvious Earth reference and keeping it abstract. However, if the reference to the Earth and in particular the link to by strapline “For an everchanging world” was not immediately clear then the logo was simply not going to serve the purpose I needed it to. A solution was not hard to find, I simply needed to make it more geographically accurate and recognisable as the Earth and it would provide the semantic meaning I was going for.
I knew finding a new colour palette would be challenging but with a new focus on looking away from traditional banking and towards a bolder, louder and prouder approach. I took inspiration from the recent BOLT rebrand which we had look at in class and I had also looked at further. As well as the rebrand for Wise, and especially how they had moved away from traditional “Banking Blue” to be in their words “Deliberately Different”
Source (https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_logo_and_identity_for_bolt_by_koto.php) Last Accessed 24/03/23
I decided to look for colours reminiscent of highlighters, or neon colours and I came up with five versions of different colours, a yellow, an orange, a pink, a blue and a green. You can see the swatch library created in Adobe Colour below. This is a huge change from where I was before, but with all the ideas I have had for my brand being people-focused, having no branches rather banking hubs with machines for cash and cheque deposits and other banking needs. As well as my focus on sustainability using recycled and recycled materials offering a metal card that should never need replaced, the sentiment used by the founder of Wish of being “Deliberately Different” really resonated and seemed right for my brand. I also thought again about my target audience 18-25-year-old university students, they don’t want traditional. They want modern and vibrant and as brand built on values of dreams and innovation, I needed colours that were loud, proud, different and new.
After getting the hex codes for all of these colours I decide to test them out using my wordmark to see what colour would suit as my primary colour. You can see these experiments below:
I felt the two colours that really stood out were the yellow and the pink. They really pop from the page especially on a dark background. Looking back at some of the colour psychology we looked at in a previous lecture, yellow started to look like the right colour for my brand moving forward. It is associated with words like: Optimism, Clarity and Warmth. These are all words I would like to have associated with my brand, I have created a brand that is people focused, uses a straight-forward and friendly tone of voice as well as looking to a better future. It is for that reason I have selected the yellow as my primary colour.