Great Goteley Wood Logo Design

Brand Identity Designs & Illustrations for Great Goteley Wood.

Client:

Great Goteley

Skills:

Brand Identity + Graphic & Web Design + Illustration

The Great Goteley Wood Logo Design & Branding was created for use on their charcoal bag packaging designs, website and other marketing which includes their company stationery. Although the logo is a digital vector, it still looks hand-drawn and natural to reinforce the organic feel of the woods.

The logo design and illustrations shown here are part of the brand identity I created for Great Goteley Wood. They wanted a logo and icon designs created, for their charcoal business, to go onto their packaging, business stationery and website. There was a fairly broad brief, which I got to experiment with, so I could provide a variety of options for the logo design.

After some brainstorming and throwing a few ideas around, we settled on the designs shown on this page. We felt that the natural feel of the illustrations worked well for what they were after. Once the design of the logo was approved, I then began designing icons to portray the characteristics of each wood type and developing their brand identity further.

Both myself and Alex really appreciate the work you have done for us and will pass on your contact details to any friends who may need your services in the future.

Duncan – Great Goteley Wood

Great Goteley Wood’s Branding

The Great Goteley Wood logo and brand identity, which consists of the logo design and bespoke illustrations, uses vector imagery created in Illustrator. Vectors allow everything to be reproduced clearly at any size. I always ensure that the quality is perfect, no matter where the logo is used. The illustrations needed to look more natural and hand-drawn. It is often a challenge to create digital artwork that looks natural due to the nature of and precision offered by digital.

For the font, I used ‘Bonzer – San Francisco’ for its clean lines and a subtle hint at spaghetti western styles. The small details help the text to flow around the circular designs and add a little extra detailing.

The banner designs enhance the other line work while still keeping it all relatively clean. We felt that these framed the owl rather nicely and gave the text a beautiful area to sit within – while reinforcing the overall circular shape.

Packaging Design

The primary purpose of the new logo and emblems was to use them on the charcoal bags, packaging designs and to fit within the Great Goteley Wood Branding. After trying a few suppliers, we settled on a size and style of bag, for which I could create the packaging artwork. There are many things which should be considered when designing packaging. The most important is sizing and safe areas. Due to the way bags are folded and sealed etc. these need to be taken into consideration so that the info and designs are clearly visible to the customer. The second is the style/colour of the packaging. As the charcoal bags were brown paper, the artwork needed to stand out clearly on a dark colour. Luckily the intention was always to go for a clean and straightforward black only design which works great.

In addition to the other designs, I also illustrated the different branch and leaf types for each wood used. We felt that this would enhance the differences between the types of charcoal, while also providing a little extra visual interest to the packaging.

Website Design

I’m delighted with how this WordPress site design turned out. See it in action here.

I used WordPress for this site so that we could quickly increase the functionality and allow for minor updates to be done by the client. At this stage, they just needed a nice looking site to provide info about the woodland management and their charcoal products.

I decided to use a one-page design for the homepage with an animated and interactive loading screen, that filters down into full-page sections for each of the main site categories. I thought that this would be an excellent way to quickly highlight the essential aspects, allowing the user to easily find out more information on the topics that they were interested in. There are several ways to navigate the homepage sections. e.g. scrolling & small side links to make it super easy to navigate.

The main navigation menu was automatically hidden, using the standard ‘burger’ icon to reveal the menu full screen for easy access. These links take the visitor to more informative pages with comprehensive information and highlights of each site section.

Owl Logo Illustration

The owl was based on a few photographs of tawny owls. I gathered a lot of references which were combined to ensure I got the characteristics correct while enabling the illustrated owl to fit well within the circular area between the logo text.

The client also asked me to incorporate oak leaves into the logo illustration. The initial idea was to have the owl sitting in an oak tree. After trying out a few ideas, I quickly realised that this would not read clearly at smaller sizes, as the owl would end up too small to notice within the tree. So, I instead illustrated an oak tree branch with a few leaves and acorns on it, for the owl to perch on.

Business card design for GReat Goteley Wood

Business card designs

We wanted to produce something a bit different, so we decided to go for a square format for the business cards, which were printed at Moo.

Emblem Designs

These emblems were created for use on Great Goteley’s charcoal bags. I achieved the natural effect by drawing each line using pressure sensitivity enabled with Illustrator on my graphics tablet.

Lineart Illustrations

I achieved the natural appearance of the illustrations by drawing each line by hand using my graphics tablet. The varied line weight was achieved by using a combination of custom illustrator brushes and playing with the line-weight settings to enhance the tapered edges to each stroke. I carefully edited the line weight of each stroke to draw attention to the prominent features and allow more breathing space for the more detailed areas.