A group critique is a great chance to put the design work you have been doing in front of several people who have not seen it before and gather opinions and feedback on how to improve it. I look forward to these sessions as it is easy to get caught up in your own design work and miss what maybe isn’t working. These sessions offer an opportunity for fresh eyes to look at your work and spot things and usually you end up with lots of new ideas and ways to make your project better.
These sessions also offer an opportunity to look at the work of others and try and offer them helpful advice and feedback, they may be struggling with a problem you have already faced or something may jump out to you that they haven’t noticed. I also find it very interesting how others have approached the same brief in a totally different way, and I find these sessions can often inject a new enthusiasm for the project and new possibilities for your design.
This particular critique was undertook using a different format than before, with the class split into smaller groups, (around six people). Previous critiques have been for the whole class, while I felt this did give me the time to get more detailed feedback from Daniel our lecturer, I did feel getting less eyes on my work may have been a disadvantage, as I am a fan of getting as much feedback as possible. As with previous critiques I did find the feedback from my classmates a little lacking even with the smaller numbers. However, I did still receive lots of good feedback which I could use to improve my design, so a very useful session, all thing considered.
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.