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The Complete Twit Identity

Like the Bourne Identity, but designed for a brand, with much more fun in it and less destructive car chases.

  • By Jon Tan on 3rd Sep 2007 in the Work Book
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  • logo
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We love designing brands and marks. Well, we love it when it goes well, but the road is often long and strewn with discarded composites and half–formed ideas. I often think of it as art in a box. The box has plenty of creative elbow room and many more than six sides, but that is a conversation for another day.

I’m here to celebrate the creation of a logo for Complete Twit, and its parent brand, Complete. We were asked to design a strong parent mark that would be flexible enough to be recognised by form alone, allowing various colours to be applied in different scenarios. This is where we ended up:

spacer

The child brand, “Complete Twit”, needed to clearly convey the message of the forthcoming website which will be a kind of Digg or Slashdot for the funny and infuriating, with a wide–ranging British sense of humour. The themes were “good clean fun”, with a small dose of “grumpy old men” (or women)—a nod to the TV series of the same name(s) and the wry humour that can come from facing ridiculous situations in modern life.

The logos are set in Futura, a geometric sans–serif created in 1927 and inspired by the Bauhaus movement of the early part of the twentieth century. It is perceived to be ultra–modern because of the geometric precision of the letterforms, but is actually ancient, with roots in 2,500 year old capitals of the Gortyn code carved into stone in Crete at the time of Pythagoras.

The type was selected specifically for its geometry. The beautiful symmetry and legibility with perfect circles and isosceles triangles. It echoes the meaning of “complete” and summarised the company’s ethics of simplicity, ease of use and openness. The “twit” text deliberately breaks the perfect geometry. The letters are precarious. In particular, the points of the “w”—two beautiful, inverted isosceles triangles when properly formed—emphasise the self–deprecating message and gives the logo a dose of sharp wit.

The symbol represents two things, depending on who you ask. My intention was to reflect the word “complete”, and the letterforms, with circles that formed a pictogram of a person with their hands in the air; an act of celebration and freedom. However, some people see it as a person from above, holding out their arms in an embrace. Both hit the mark well enough (forgive the hard–to–resist pun.)

The logo is already in use for the completetwit.com holding page and with the trade mark attorneys as I write. Hopefully, you’ll be seeing a lot more of it in the future!


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  • On the 22nd Nov 2007 at 15:17 GMT, Richard wrote:

A nice, clean logo - looking forward to the launch of the website!


Folios


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