Evolution of Climate Rubik's logo design
By Orchi, Visual design lead.
Designing Climate Rubik’s logo was a both a design and visualization challenge. There were two core depictions, Climate crisis as well as Rubik's cube as a part of solution building, apart from the values of the website that needed to be depicted. We went through a wild brainstorm to put all on our table and then eliminated them one by one.
The relevant keywords for mood board were: urgency, solution building, balance, crisis, energy, pollution, planet, defiance.
Process
The design process was simple, to design the form but rounding down and then choosing the colours.
Form
Now we had to wildly visualise everything that could encompass these, in two ways.
- Created a separate element as the logo symbol.
- Design the font or name into a unique element
We went through several ways of depicting either of the given values/elements as a separate symbol. Or simply putting elements together
Since we didn't reach anywhere with elemental combinations, in the next trials we tried combining these in the name itself and see whether anything fits in at all.
The most difficult part was bringing the element of Rubik and climate urgency or any of the other elements together into one. Neither could we ditch the Rubik's cube because it seemed to form quite a core essence in the logo.
We tried moving it in various directions until it hit us, one after the other!
As we narrowed the values, urgency was a top priority.
And the urgency of Climate could be an inverted i (!) or exclamation. Depiction of any other aspect was secondary. While Rubik could have one letter in the nature of Rubik's cube. Which brought us or first iteration of the final logo
We were close but there were things that looked off. What if the entire Rubik was in letters that imitated the Rubik's cube?
Font creation
This was a quiet wild stage in this design. As there were no fonts available as such we decided to create a font to depict the Rubik's cube, as in something that could further serve as the brand's identity in the future.
And we did it.
Voila!
Iterations
Next came a series of iterations to adjust Climate and Rubik together.
- Changing the font of ‘Climate’ from Nunito to Lora to create a strong contrast between both words as well as add a touch of elegance that the website aimed for.
- And secluding the exclamation in red to depict emergency
Colours
The colours of Climate Rubik would also depict the website colours, which is its essential product. Pertaining to the existing values we decided to go with combinations that are bold, passionate and unflinching in expression of difficult issues.
Hence we chose black, red and white as primary colours, while a less saturated version of the red and cream as secondary colours.
Red was a strong depiction of both urgency and passion, as well as a good combiner with either black or white to demarcate a Rubik cube from a Tetris block.
And we arrived with our final logo.
