The Symbol
After deciding what kind of business I wanted to create, I used my story for inspiration on drawing up a symbol. A logo that would depict our journey into business and speak our mission into existence. I wanted something that connected with it on a deeper level.
The initial image that I had in mind derived from the imagery and concepts that originally inspired my business journey. I wanted to create something original and unique to stand out in the sea-of-sameness online.
While designing my logo, I wanted it to accomplish a few things. One of them, was be able to stand the test of time, in a traditional way that I could spawn more creative elements with. While drawing it up, I kept a few things in mind.
For branding and merchandising, it needed to be simple enough that the cost of printing wouldn’t be extravagant or complicated with hard to see fonts or too many colors. I used fonts that stuck to the theme, and used a minimal color approach to give people a clear idea about what we do with just the name of the company.
This is when I came up with the name Digital Business Traffic, which checked all of my entrepreneurial boxes with associating keyword search terms for optimization with an elegantly-creative touch of simplicity.
The name was 24 character long with spaces included, so to design a logo that fit, I styled the words ontop of one another in a cascade keeping the letters large enough to be readable when the logo was at smaller sizes.
Within the words, I used vector image editing to sink the top of the word ‘Traffic’ into the shape of a smile, that can easily be seen through the negative space in the back of the image. The bottom of the T was dragged out to serve as an underline to the logo as a whole.
Once the company name and logo idea was decided, I played with different elevations of the words and experimented with different styles for fonts. The idea for character integration was included within the logo image itself, by adding a character of a traffic light that would later serve as a company content mascot and animated brand ambassador.
Once the character was added to the right of the words, I adjusted the height of it to match the words by designing it to the same scaled-size. This helped the words pop up and added recognizability as well as advertisement functions.
The font chosen was to match the bold style of content that felt right for our media kit. The colors for the letters were chosen as a deep blue, to instill dependability and reliability in our brand. The negative space of white helped pronounce the image clearly.
The traffic light image was converted from a simple emoji that was used in early social content, animating it provided easier options for audience building, content creation and connected with our company name to make it easier to remember.
From there, I sprinkled in a few meaningful hidden elements into the logo. Some of the hidden meanings are derived from my life, ideas and passions.
