Do Good Design

I spent last week designing a fourth logo for The Sorting Room cooperative: the “circus” logo.

Since The Sorting Room is about bringing together amateur and professional artists and musicians in a space that encourages creativity, fun and community, I felt like the 3 logos I’d already designed were too staid.

Cirque du Soleil for creative inspiration

I did my usual big heap of research and honed in on circuses to capture that fun — even mad — feeling that I think we have going on in this project. I checked out Cirque du Soleil and Archaos, two surreal and highly imaginative circuses for ideas on branding.

This got my imagination going. If you’ve ever seen Cirque du Soleil, you’ll know they can be very unexpected and playful. They are definitely not the mainstream, and I took some of that off-the-wall feeling as inspiration.

But I wanted to keep the feeling old-fashioned, so I also had a look for vintage circus posters, harking back to the days of Barnum-Bailey and the grand traveling circuses.

Vintage circus posters

Aren’t the colours marvelous?

The Wild West comes to town

I chose a font, Rough Riders Redux, that brings a flavour of the Wild West and circus acts in the early 1900s.

I did 3 colour versions of the logo. Here’s the simplest:

The 2 colour “circus” logo

 

“Pillar box red” logo

Since The Sorting Room was originally for the Post Office to sort the mail, using a colour known as “pillar box red” makes sense. According to colour psychology, red is a passionate, vibrant colour which stimulates and energizes (for more on this, see my article The Colour Symbolism of Red).

With this logo, I used white for contrast and to literally lighten up the white. This is the simplest version.

Now let’s add a 4th colour: turquoise.

The 4 colour “circus” logo

Logos can look ugly at first. Ugly or really boring.

Usually, a committee gets together to assess a new logo and takes away anything interesting or controversial until everyone agrees. But the end result is often also utterly forgettable.

To be honest, I think this version is a bit ugly, but it’s the unusual colour combination that could make it work really well.

 

The problem with just red and white is that it’s used a lot in logos. Not too many use turquoise as well, and I think the pale blue gives the logo an edge, a modern quality, it might otherwise lack.

OK, the final version is extravagant, but I had to play. It’s my favourite, but I’m not sure how practical and flexible this logo would be:

The harlequin circus logo

I had such fun with this version — it’s definitely my favourite.

I took colour inspiration from Harlequin’s costumes that you often see at Mardi Gras.

The festive colours are such fun. The dark, neutral colour of the brown (it may appear black on your screen since it’s quite dark) make the other colours pop out like a Jack-in-the-box.

It’s playful, fun and festive. The problem is that brown is the dominant colour here, and its earthiness and calm might overwhelm everything. It’s also a lot of colours.

Which logo is right for The Sorting Room?

I’ve had the initial brand meeting with fellow co-op members and people seem pretty evenly divided. So I’ll keep tweaking and see if I can create a solution.

Another possibility is to use the 2 colour model but let different artists use a unique colour for their line of work, since our shop will be selling items from several people.

Which logo and version do you like the best?