This week we were joined by Ronan McKinless an experienced User Experience designer, having worked for a design agency, start-ups and major businesses. He spoke to us about the different roles available for designers as well as some tips as to how we could make ourself more employable. He also shared his experiences of working in different environments, for different types of business and some things to look for when searching out employment. The key to the whole lecture was to get us to think about what type of design work we enjoy the most and what environment we might want to work in, as when we return in September we will immediately starting to look for placement positions. So knowing what kind of role we are looking for and what companies we might like to work for, will help us tailor our CVs and portfolios to be most appealing to these companies and recruiters for these roles. Ronan then stayed on and offered some one-to-one advice on our current projects.
My bank logomark has been a bit of a thorn in my side throughout this project, I have went through so many different iterations, and inevitably I have ended up back in the same place, with a simple wordmark in my display typeface. I thought I might have been onto something when I had combined this wordmark with a logo depicting the earth which linked nicely with my value of sustainability. You can see this iteration below:
I don’t feel this is a bad design for a logomark at all, but; and this really shows the importance of getting as many eyes on a design as possible; as Ronan pointed out during our discussion this could be read as FUTRO, rather than FUTR with an Earth logomark. I have to admit I hadn’t noticed this but like a lot of things once it was pointed out, once you have seen it you can’t miss it. I also brought this concern up when I spoke with our regular lecturer Daniel, and as I showed him my designs he suggested that my simple wordmark was strong enough on its own and it didn’t require the extra logo at the end.
As I mentioned above throughout this process I had often ended up back at the wordmark so this was not a shock and probably just my lack of experience thinking that I needed a logomark and a wordmark for a brand rather than realising that if one was strong enough, you didn’t need the other. I am still glad I did go through the process of trying to create other marks as it was a good learning experience and a lesson in trusting your gut on these things.
The final question was one of colour, I had created two colourways of my wordmark: yellow text on a black background and black text on a yellow background, each for different use cases dependent on the background of the app/website/poster/advert. The question was which one should be my primary logomark and which the alternate. You can see both below:
Daniel had said that he preferred the second option,, I had always been looking towards the first option as my primary mark. With this split I decided to create an A/B user survey on Google forms to gain further opinions and see which came out as favourite among a group of my target users. These are the same users I surveyed at the start of the project for their attitudes towards banking and those results had steered the brand this far so I felt that they were the perfect group to ask. And just to confirm the fact I also offered the option of the combination mark, just to be sure it was definitely the right decision to ditch it (I feel it will be, as the opinions I have are from two experienced and skilled designers, although they do not fit my user group).
Here is the survey I created:
And here are the results:
