Concept visualised

Now that we have the concept firmly established, we have set about designing a document which shows the concept to Bath university. They may reject the idea, but we feel that we must put a lot of effort into visualizing the idea to give it the best possible chance.
Myself, Andy Ashwin and Nathan set about this task. Andy had ordered a helix science stencil online which had arrived, so we set aside a few days to work on the visualisation of our idea.
First, we all came up with potential logos for the branding of this concept. Andy Ashwin had come up with the idea of playing on the rather overstated description of the IT technitions at Apple. Their genius bar is well established and iconic, but they are not really genius's. The chemistry guys at Bath Uni really are. So Andy suggested that we play on this idea, branding the bath uni guys actual genius's and playing on the existing genius logo.
I liked this idea and set about developing some logo ideas based around the word "genius" and "actual genius".
Their current logo is an awful green and black colour.

I thought that the best place to start with an idea for a logo is with this. They have mentioned something about not being able to change the logo despite its awful appearance, but I am going to try it anyway and see if the idea is a possibility in our meeting with them. 

It is quite amazing how much of a difference this new colour scheme has made to the logo. It is so much more punchy and powerful as a logo. It looks more refined and sophisticated. I am going to develop this idea and see if I can come up with a logo that is completely unique for branding this idea. 

I actually really like the above idea that I have created. It plays on the hexagon shape that is used in chemistry diagrams. It is made playful by the way that genius runs in a ring around the word bar. It uses the din typeface. Din is such a nice sans serif font. It has a science, clinical feel about it. It comes in various weights including light and medium which are used here. The only problem with this typeface is that I read sbarn it is viewed from left to right. 

I quite liked the above logo. I am playing around with perspective and chemical structures. I heavily kerned the word genius to give it a lighter, more sophisticated feel. This balances the unsophisticated nature of the image of chemical bonds. However, then I got told that it looks like a cat. This has ruined it for me as now that is all that I can see!

I quite like the orange logo of these two. the fine line on the light typeface and the light stroke around the hexagon shapes which underline the word genius give it a sophisticated feel. The heavy kerning also helps with this. I was experimenting with typeface on the black attempt at logo. I thought that perhaps a more rounded typeface may be more effective than the din typeface because it is more friendly in appearance. However, we are trying to advertise genius's and playing on the apple genius logo, I think it needs the sophisticated feel. 

Now that the three of us had some logos designed, we set about creating a pdf presentation of our concept. 

Andy came up with a nifty 3 dimentional model that was created in 3d modelling software. He created an idea where the black board behind the figures would be used to draw on with chalk, through the large stencils as the science guys give their talks and demonstrations. 

We have decided upon the typeface of Din. This typeface has a stencil version which is great for when we come to put text onto our large stencils. 

Me and nathan photographed the helix stencil that we had and then we set about doing some nifty and convincing photoshop work where we enlarged the stencil to visualise the size of the finished object. I am quite happy with the result of this. It took us a lot of attempts to photograph the stencil so that the lighting across it was even, but also so that it had a transparency it. In the end, we used remote flash and flashed the stencil both front and back during the shot. 

Nathan then put all of the content that we had created into the pdf ipad app and we were all set to go and present our concept! Thankfully, they were very impressed with the concept and we have finally got them excited about the project and about our ideas. The meeting was in a pub. This was a good idea, it was a relaxed atmosphere and ideas flow when you are in this type of environment. We now need a definitive list of things that they are going to talk about in their presentations and talks so that we can create symbols to illustrate what they are saying. We also decided that we will have a weekly meeting every Monday from this moment onwards. This seems like a good idea. We can regularly reflect on progress made and the project should move on quickly.