Building The Brand: The Alpha Club - Logo Choices (Part 2 of 3)

You may have read our 1st post in this 3 part series entitled: Building The Brand’. Within these articles you will gain a constructive insight into how we as a creative agency go about planning and executing a brand design as well as some practical examples of applying the brand across multiple media channels. The case study you will view throughout this series is The Alpha Club, a chain of breakfast, holiday and after school clubs running in London.

This, part 2 will take a look at the logo choices we presented to the client as well as justifications for each. Our brief and research uncovered that there were three target that the brand and supporting marketing material would need to target – namely children, parents and headteachers/administrators of new schools. So let’s move on to the Logo Choices!

This first choice ventures down the fun and playful design root. It has a more personal and caring touch to it and in doing so caters well for both children and parents. The design intends to encompass the full age group (4-11) of your clubs and in doing so have not over-babied the design.

Strengths:

• Personal touch (hand drawn effect)
• Not to imposing
• Caters to children

Weaknesses:

• May be deemed as unprofessional
• May not be sustainable as brand if business strengths change
• Requires a lot of artwork (extra elements) to support brand foundation

Option 2 uses a more so serious design with playful elements being seen within the children’s handprints on page. This design takes a very safe approach drawing on elements of successful branding seen in other larger businesses.

Strengths:

• More professional approach
• Still maintains some playful elements

Weaknesses:

• Very mid ground design (some may deem is as not exciting enough)
• Uses a lot of width to display logo
• Minimum width/height for text to be legible

The final logo design choice looks at the most “professional” design. We have encapsulated the carer child relationship within the “p-h” of Alpha. This subtler approach will have the strongest impact when presenting the company and brand as a larger, more stable business.

Strengths:

• Very professional design (gives an impression of large size and quality)
• Sustainable brand elements
• Caters well to head teachers and organisations as well as parents

Weaknesses:

• Quite an impersonal design (for children)
• Clarity of the word ‘Alpha’

Conclusions

Our client decided to go for option 3 as there was a strong desire to target new schools primarily as a driver for business growth. Hopefully this article has proved useful in explaining how and why design choices (in relation to brand) are made and will help you to pose questions to your graphics/branding/creative agency when they present options to you. Keep following this blog for updates when the 3rd part in the series is released; we are providing a step by step walkthrough of how the logo was created for The Alpha Club!