Parrot Hosting is a UK based hosting company with friendly, personal support for Small Businesses and Start-Up’s that need a helping hand to get their website on the internet.
Amongst its services it offers Joomla hosting, Email hosting as well as UK and US hosting.
They provide ongoing assistance in setting up your domain, organising your emails and getting your website up and running.
Before commencing work on this identity design project Dot Design firstly supplied Parrot Hosting with a questionnaire to find out more about the business and what it wanted to communicate to its audience and potential customers.
Using this as a basis we presented 6 initial concepts for Parrot Hosting’s logo design, below we take you quickly through each concept…
These concepts are only ever presented as starting points and are points of discussion with the client and then further development/refinement on chosen areas.
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Initial Logo Design Concept No: 1
We wanted to look at ways we could create an icon, something that would be memorable and easily applied to social media platforms such as twitter and facebook etc. The icon below of a stylised and simplified parrot accomplished this and ment the graphic could stand alone as a distinctive marque.
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Initial Logo Design Concept No: 2
Working with the idea of origami as an adaptable theme, that could be played with across a number of media with this concept.
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Initial Logo Design Concept No: 3
Abstracting and creating a parrot’s head using three simple shapes, creating an icon that works well and would be immediately recognisable. These shapes could be used in other marketing material in the future to support the identity such as one stationery and other media.
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Initial Logo Design Concept No: 4
A parrot in silhouette to create a simple icon which could be used without company name.
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Initial Logo Design Concept No: 5
Building on concept 1, creating a friendlier character with breakout wings, again strong enough to be used alone once the brand was established. Could be used as an icon in other media such as twitter avatar etc..
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Initial Logo Design Concept No: 6
Working with the idea of parrots feathers, these were used to replace several letters within the company name, not as strong as some of the other concepts but worth inclusion as a starting point.
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Logo Design Development: 1
At this point Les at Parrot Hosting decided that Concept 5 was worth exploring further.
I then started to looking at ways of making the logo more rounded and less flat colour in look.
Focusing on using gradients, drop shadows and highlights I started to create a slightly more raised effect to the identity.
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Logo Design Development: 2
As well as exploring the different effects, I looked at how the character/icon could be treated and illustrated differently. By adding a feathered head, backward tail feathers and different angles of wings so see how this changed the character of the Parrot.
I also looked at different positioning and sizes of the eyes at this point, as all these can greatly change the overall personality of any character.
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Logo Design Development: 3
After careful consideration by the client, the feedback was a mixture of styles from above design development, finishing at a design that closely followed the original concept 5. I then looked at several layouts of graphic and typography using this selection.
A great project to work on and I’m really happy with the final solution (above) which I feel is both striking, distinctive, memorable and friendly in tone. I’d really be interested in hearing your views and comments on this project.
Here are a few words from Les at Parrot Hosting…
Client testimonial:
“Gareth did exactly what I requested in the form of a new corporate logo that would suit my present as well as future marketplace.
The result shows that in allowing a professional to design something from the ground up it is possible to achieve a result which is both spectacular and unique.”
