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As we continue our look into how the Church Juice brand was developed, our next step was to fine tune the logo by selecting colors and finalizing font choices.  We decided to do these two steps in tandem since we were fairly close to having a final logo we liked in its black and white form.

We decided initially that the color palate for this project should include greens, oranges and grays.  Green and orange give some homage to the idea of orange juice and fruit itself with a green stem.  Again, the colors give the idea of orange juice without literally using orange juice or fruit.  The gray was more of a subtle complement than using black.  It also helps us avoid looking to Halloween-ish with orange and black.  Here’s the first round of logos we received with color.

We were drawn to the brighter orange and green used in the text of 1a, 1b and 1c.  Plus we liked the bubble options as well.  They were like the original concept only with a few less bubbles.  There was something about 1h we liked as well.  There seemed to be more contrast and separation of the words church and juice if one of the words was gray.  Plus by taking some of the color out of the words, the bubbles popped out a little more.  We also decided we didn’t want to use a color gradient, which appeared in a lot of the options.  At the time, it was sort of a popular thing to do in logos and I guess it still is.  However, we preferred the solid colors and thought it would be easier to use in everything from printing to promotional items. 

This round included a variation in font as well.  As a staff we had ruled out the contrast of a chunky font for church and a thin font for juice which was in the original concept (at the top of this post) and asked the designer to use only the thicker font.  This change mainly had to do with the fact that the Church Juice logo would appear on a lot of things with a black background because our parent organization, ReFrame Media, uses a lot of black.  We didn’t want the thin font to get lost if the logo is shrunk down on ReFrame materials.

However, we we got these concepts, we decided the font looked a little too retro.  We liked it in general, but thought it could date itself once the retro design fad died off. 

So in the next round we looked at a few more color options as well as a font change.  There were some folks on our staff who still weren’t sure about the bubble placement in the logo, so we asked for a few variations of that as well.  Here’s what we got:

These were some interesting options.  They were all good in their own way, but looking at them helped us realize the original bubble placement was our favorite.  And these extra designs didn’t go to waste.  We decided to keep those other bubble arrangements to use as art for other things.  For example, the bubbles of option 1b-b get used next to the page numbers in some of our white papers and case studies as a little graphical element.

As for color, we decided to do a mix between 1h-a and 1b-a.  We liked the gray and orange text best, but also liked the bubbles that had more color and kept part of the green in the logo.  Take all of that and add the lightening of the gray for the word church and we ended up with our final logo choice, which I still love even after a year.  That's good, right?  (I honestly can't remember why some options with blue appeared in this round.  I think it might of had something to do with including a color that wasn't necessarily orange fruit related.)  

Up next we’ll wrap up this series with a look at how we picked some other graphical elements we use to express the Church Juice brand.  Plus we’ll look at some key things to remember when going though the branding process. 

Other posts in this series:

Church Juice Branding Process: We Almost Got It All Wrong

Brand Expression: Picking A Name

Finding the Right Church Juice Logo