Weatherzone Rebrand, Finally
This is something I’ve worked long and hard to get the business unit to address and finally we’ve got a new B2B brand and logo for the organisation.
In nutshell the idea was to modernise the design of the brand and position the B2B and B2C sides of the business to a place where it’s easier to sell from a B2B perspective by positioning from a very iconic brand being Weatherzone.
The big thing with logo design is creating a something that’s simple, memorable, iconic and just works. With the Weatherzone logo how do you define a logo that is both for B2B and B2C while representing what weather is and the definitiveness of the science the company is founded.
My first few attempts at the logo created more questions than answers, a straight typographic concept though read and perfectly reasonable add nothing to the personality of the brand. Also to mention the logo really need to be readable across mediums, so I resorted back to Al Reis’ tips for logotype design and fit it to the ratio of the eyes.
Now finding a great font was tough, nothing seemed to work or feel like “Weatherzone”, strange to say I know so I decided to draw back to the brand and find the elements that work well. With all the fonts I was using there was a clear typographic issue between certain letter, so I started to mix type and created custom glyphs. Now finally getting somewhere.
Myriad was used as the base font, kerning in tight I decided to cut letters out to follow the line, the “t” and “rz” had the most loving because they seemed to break the readability of the the word “Weatherzone”. This actually brought up another consideration, to stack or not to stack Weather on top of zone… Well it did make the logotype far more dynamic but after a little research I soon released most would relate the logo to the Weather Channel (the competition) so a sticky point of contention.
This would also break the readability of the brand, this wasn’t a good thing. So back to the one line tight kerned type, but something was missing it needed something to relate to the science of weather.
How to make it technical without taking to element of friendliness out of the branding, this did my head really. It needed to be both “Sciencey” and simple, a tough task but after thinking long and hard it hit me, a degrees symbol on the text because it would relate to the subject matter therefore adding the sense of science without detracting from the simplicity of the branding.
After a few meetings with management we nailed it.
My first few attempts at the logo created more questions than answers, a straight typographic concept though read and perfectly reasonable add nothing to the personality of the brand. Also to mention the logo really need to be readable across mediums, so I resorted back to Al Reis’ tips for logotype design and fit it to the ratio of the eyes.
Now finding a great font was tough, nothing seemed to work or feel like “Weatherzone”, strange to say I know so I decided to draw back to the brand and find the elements that work well. With all the fonts I was using there was a clear typographic issue between certain letter, so I started to mix type and created custom glyphs. Now finally getting somewhere.
Myriad was used as the base font, kerning in tight I decided to cut letters out to follow the line, the “t” and “rz” had the most loving because they seemed to break the readability of the the word “Weatherzone”. This actually brought up another consideration, to stack or not to stack Weather on top of zone… Well it did make the logotype far more dynamic but after a little research I soon released most would relate the logo to the Weather Channel (the competition) so a sticky point of contention.
This would also break the readability of the brand, this wasn’t a good thing. So back to the one line tight kerned type, but something was missing it needed something to relate to the science of weather.
How to make it technical without taking to element of friendliness out of the branding, this did my head really. It needed to be both “Sciencey” and simple, a tough task but after thinking long and hard it hit me, a degrees symbol on the text because it would relate to the subject matter therefore adding the sense of science without detracting from the simplicity of the branding.
After a few meetings with management we nailed it.