"Celebrating 20 Years"

The next step was to deal with the "20 years" type under the G&B logo which Will and I agree doesn't quite work. As a solution I messed around with the type positions and point sizes and came up with some different experiments in size and shape.

Most of these have something positive about them but we weren't sure if any of them worked in context of the packaging. My favourite is the 4th from top design, although when actually placed on the packaging it didn't seem to fit with the theme of the packaging. 

Will has much more experience with using type so we decided that he should look at the type and see if he had any ideas. He also did a few experiments and then came up with the example that we will continue to use from now on. 

It simplifies the sentence and gets rid of the annoying 'of' which just kept getting in the way in the previous statement. It also works well in terms of hierarchy and shape and suits the redesigned packaging pretty well in place of the "ORGANIC".

Logo Design

The idea came about to create some kind of logo or symbol that could be used to represent the packaging and maybe the campaign as a whole. I started by thinking about what could be used as the symbol and thought about using the leaf and what it stands for.

Using the leaf alone seemed a bit too simple as it is already used on the existing packaging and is too similar to use in new packaging. I then thought about what the leaf actually is and realised that it is meant to represent a cocoa leaf.

From this I thought that the symbol could possibly be something to do with the actually cocoa leaf or cocoa beans which lead me to come up with this concept for a logo.

The idea was to show a cocoa bean/ pod split in half with the existing cocoa leaf design being used as leaves coming out of the top. I thought this worked ok, as this is pretty much exactly what the cocoa pod looks like split in half showing the beans inside. 

That is until Will pointed out that it looks a lot like a hand grenade. 

Now all I can think is that it looks pretty much exactly like a hand grenade. 

So I started from scratch and thought about keeping it much simpler. I talked to Will about it and said that I wanted to keep it simple and maybe use the cocoa leaf in some way, at which point Will suggested that I use 20 of the leaves to represent the 20 years that the company has been around for. 

I thought this was a really good suggestion and got on with trying to design a logo for 20 leaves together in some way. 

This 10 x 2 idea works ok visually but is very similar to the background pattern and wouldn't really stand out. 

This design is a bit more complex and looks different to the one above but is still a bit similar. 

And again the 10 x 2 variation seems a bit too much like a pattern than a logo.

So I started working with 5 x 4 shapes instead and I think it made some much more interesting results. 

I experimented with a few different variations of using the 4 x 5 symbol in different rotations and different positions on the packaging. I like most of these variations, but decided to settle on this last design for a template of all the packaging. 

I think this packaging works well and will work well across the range, changing the background colour and the leaf pattern colour. Im still not sure about the "Celebrating 20 years of organic chocolate" part of the design but it works well enough for now. Here is a view of the original and the redesigned packaging. 

And the 20 leaves for 20 years symbol.

Introducing logos

Green & Blacks are renowned for working environmentally consciously in the creation of their chocolate and their work with fair trade and other followings. I wanted to include a couple of these logos in the packaging as G&B can use them as a selling point and help gain some customer interest by showing off that they do conform to some really good environmental standards.

I started by including the Fair Trade logo. Originally the logo looks like this:

To help fit in with the theme of the existing packaging and the redesign I have simplified the colours used.

The same shape and effect of the logo are kept and still relate the same way to the fair trade following. Realistically I don't know whether Fair Trade would endorse the changing of their logo colour for G&B packaging but it works nicely as a concept. 

I also wanted to include the existing Soil Association Organic Standard logo seen on the packaging. To do this I vectorised the image and tried to find the typeface that I could use to recreate the loop of type around the outside of the logo but couldn't find one to fit properly.

In the end I just live traced the type as a simpler solution to the problem and used the logo along with the fair trade logo.