Illusions

When I was in the final block of my HND year at college we were given a very exciting project, the purpose here was to create a corporate identity for a fictional themed cafe bar that would be called Illusions. The bar was an upcoming magic themed place similar to the Hard Rock Cafe as well as other themed functions, and this would be somewhere were the family can go for a meal or friends and relatives can enjoy a night out.

So obviously now you know it was magic themed and so now onto what the identity was meant to be about. The purpose of the brief was to create a logo for the cafe bar Illusions that would capture what the place was about mainly in just the word as we were told to preferably use typography instead of an image with the name in type next to it, and we were to make the logo an illusion in itself to go with the magic theme.

I started off this project with quite a bit of difficulty as I couldn't find the right type of magic theme that I wanted to incorporate into my design so struggled to come up with a decent idea and saw that most people in the class were creating some really good sketches for their designs, and upon seeing this decided to go back and do a little bit more research and then started to go with an idea of using magic card and knew I wanted to create an image made out of the type, but still wasn't too sure of how `i was going to to this until my tutor showed me some very creative pieces of work where the artist had images of fish, a gorilla and buildings using nothing but type with a very funky 1960's style. This became my inspiration but never did find out who the designer was.

Once I had decided on a theme and style I then had no problem coming up with designs and it was through this that I wanted to design a logo that looked both fun and attractive, that would appeal to almost any age group. I then decided that the shape I wanted was an ace of spade to go with my card idea and so did a few various sketches of how I would fit the text inside the image as I thought that by doing this I could make the actual text/image and illusion so that when someone looked at the logo they would have to look really hard to read what the image said and once I had the final solution I chose two fonts that I would alter to become my logo. The fonts I used were Musicals and Action Is.

So then I had finished my logo but though it needed something else just to make it more peculiar and appealing so I then made the letter O stand out a bit more but changing it to a different colour so that it then became the focal point of the identity and also decided to make it swirl like what you see when someone is being hypnotized.

In the end I was actually pretty proud of this logo and hope you like it as well an feel free to comment on what you think of it.