Star Waggons logo makeover

Star Waggons logo, before and after

In the process of establishing a new look and feel for Star Waggons, we created a “look book” that served two purposes. Firstly, it contained our detailed analysis of the existing identity, including our thoughts on its origin, historical value, and efficacy. Secondly, the look book established our goals for the redesign, both verbally and through a scrapbook-style spread full of inspirational design materials.

The Star Waggons logo deserved particular attention. We devoted a page of the look book to the Star Waggons logo, which was designed originally in the late 1970s in emulation of the Star Wars wordmark. Since then, it had been painted on every Star Waggons movie trailer, and it was on every piece of their collateral from business cards to t-shirts and hats. But its execution, from a typographical standpoint, was sloppy, especially in the vector PDF form that I was given. My assumption had been that logo had probably degraded over time, after having been copied by hand over and over and eventually one of these copies was traced into Illustrator when it made sense to digitize it.

The whole “point” of the existing logo, as it were, was to emulate the deep perspective used in the opening of every Star Wars film. Unfortunately, in Star Waggons’ logo, lines which should have been parallel were askew, and the overall stroke weight and proportion of the letters was completely inconsistent. At the same time, the logo was extremely recognizable and popular under its own power; it made little sense to try to establish an entirely new brand theme when elements of the existing one had never been put to their full potential. The last thing the Star Waggons team wanted to do was to lose their logo—it’s quite dear to them. So our mission was clear: we had to give the logo a sensitive makeover, retaining its best features and refining away its worst.

We found inspiration for our task in the revered typographer Ed Benguiat’s rework of the original New York Times logo. Here is an excerpt from the Star Waggons look book, proposing our new direction:

Ed Benguiat’s revision of the New York Times logo.

A perfect example of this type of restoration is Ed Benguiat’s work for The New York Times in the 1970s. As an accomplished typographer, Benguiat recognized the value of The New York Times’ original logotype and was loathe to modify it beyond recognition. Instead, his version includes very subtle tweaks that increase the quality of the logo while respecting its original design. The end result is staggering; it feels as though Benguiat’s version is how the logo always was and how it always should have been. With some careful and respectful revision, we can achieve the same result with Star Waggons’ logo.

And so once we were given approval to move forward, we created the new logo design. It maintains the spirit of the original, but is cleaner, better proportioned, and more rhythmic by leaps and bounds. After delivering the redesigned wordmark, the client told us exactly what we had hoped: it felt to them as though the logo should have always looked this way.

A new Star Waggons employee t-shirt, one of the first items to bear the new logo.

Tags: identity, logo, Star Waggons, wordmark

Updates and ramblings

One of the biggest challenges that I and probably many small business owners face is the inherent conflict between running a full-time business, and being able to zoom out to document and self-promote. To get even more specific, it takes a certain amount of discipline to be able to add to one’s own website when one is creating websites for others! Every so often, I take stock of what’s happened in the past weeks and months and put together a few new pieces for the three steps ahead portfolio section. But recently I decided that a three steps ahead blog would be a great way to supplement the new content we display on our portfolio with additional commentary, interstitial updates (such as works-in-progress), and related links, such as other artists or pieces by which we are inspired.

To that end, let’s get caught up on 2008, now that it’s more over than not!

This year we’ve worked with a bunch of great new clients as well as our loyal regulars. We kicked off the year with a site for David J. Williams, a science fiction author whose new book The Mirrored Heavens was the focus of his site, www.autumnrain2110.com. We helped to launch Jennifer Uman’s spa business with a simple, effective new site and “apothecary-inspired” visual identity, which you can see at www.jenniferuman.com. We’ve continued to create a vast amount of design for New York University’s various colleges and departments, including new initiatives for The Gallatin School of Individualized Study (my alma mater) and NYU’s Stern School of Business. We’re in the process of creating a web “facelift” for Gallatin’s main presence, and a new PictureBubbles° venture to announce and describe their new home’s upcoming LEED certification.

But wait, there’s more! We have several new projects that I have not yet had a chance to add to our portfolio:

We’re now working with Star Waggons, the leading provider of movie production trailers to the film industry. If you’ve ever passed by a film or TV set (not exactly a rarity for those of us here in Southern California), it’s pretty likely that you’ve seen their Star Wars inspired logo on the side of their trailers. To date, we’ve updated their branding and we’re in the process of creating an altogether new site for Star Waggons, complete with a series of PictureBubbles° panoramic interior shots of the trailers (similar to our PictureBubbles° work for Smashbox / Quixote). I’ll be posting more details about our Star Waggons projects in the coming weeks and months.

We’ve also started a long term business relationship with Drayton Hall, an exemplary 18th-century plantation home in South Carolina which has been turned over to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to be preserved (not restored) for the public. The site is an invaluable historical resource for learning more about life in the region from antebellum times to the 20th century, both for the Drayton family who owned the property, and the African-Americans who were brought there as slaves and whose descendants continued to be employed by the family after emancipation. We’re in the process of designing site signage to aid the museum’s interpretive mission, and we’ve created a new print identity for their marketing pieces as well.

FireFly Events logo

Firefly Events came to us for design consulting while they were in the process of launching their new business, which helps create extremely unique and memorable (in a good way!) events both for bachelor/bachelorette parties as well as team-building corporate retreats. Stuff like paintball, bungee jumping, beer making, Zorbing, and “divorce parties,” to name a few. We’ve designed a logo and a set of business cards for them to help get the word out about their new enterprise.

FireFly Events business cards

All told it’s been a magnificent three-quarters-of-a-year. I’ll be posting more updates soon!