Fifth World London | Brand Identity & Enablers '14

XIXXCI FIFTHWORLD FIFTH WORLD LONDON xix xci

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FIFTH WORLD LONDON INTRODUCTION

Fifth World London is a techno mono, brand led clothing label run primarily as an online retail store. The brand targets the niche audience of the street goth the fashion trend industry. The business is under the ownership of Jordan Michael Abraham, a Design student from Brunel University in West London. This report consists of the key components required to establish the business in the forms of an online store and website including, but not limited to, the aims and objectives for the business, the challenges to be overcome as well as the third parties involved and the methods of creation, marketing and distribution.

Founded in 2013, Fifth World is inspired by the desire to show expression through apparel, design and art. The brand prides itself on producing high quality products for an international audience, yet all Fifth World products are made in London. limited number of many designs as well as having an 'Essential Range' that is always available, from the online store. Sitting comfortably between high independent brand that bridges the gap between these two markets, offering high quality products at a fraction of the price.

The role of a design and business consultant should exist to showcase the skills of an individual in regards to designing various aspects of a company for a client, while also offering up valuable business insights to aid the company in its viability and potential for expansion. The benefit of a client engaging a design and business consultant, would be to cut out the various advisors they would potentially need to see regarding start up or relaunch of a business/brand. It is my aim after university to start up such a design and business consultancy agency. However first, I must showcase my ability to actually deliver a project in an efficient manner. For this reason I embarked upon the setting up and running of a fashion orientated business, whereby I would design and sell various garments via an online store. A project of this nature encompasses various aspects of design and multimedia technology as well as business acumen. Throughout this report, I will express how I developed the ideas mentioned above, designed the chosen garments and ultimately started up my own fashion business: Fifth World.

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BRAND/IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT

The Fifth World London brand, represented by the roman numeral brick block, or large letter ‘X’, is a simplistic adaptation of one of the first pieces of inspiration I had from some of the early of research I did.

The idea of using roman numerals was something that was set in stone from an early stage (no pun intended). Visually, this helped give off the look and feel of modern mini- malism and a level of acceptance and potential in the street fashion culture, alongside existing links to fine art and the historic culture that I was looking to incorporate.

With the label intending to be heavily brand orientated, I needed a logo that had a level of weight to it: something visually bold and striking but yet easily recognizable. It also had to look the part: it had to have more to it than ‘just another high street label’ while still comfortably sitting below the more high-end established brands such as Givenchy or Rick Owens. I decided that keeping it simple and effective was the way forward. Just like a brand name, the most effective brands have very simple, easily identifiable logos. A simple rule of thumb would be that if you can’t look at a logo for just 10 seconds and then draw it with a pen and paper, it’s too complex.

The Primary logo shows the year ‘1991’, through the two numerals of ‘XIX’ being ’19’, and ’91’ being ‘XCI. The idea of breaking up the actual roman numerals for ‘1991’ (MC- MXCI) into ‘XIX’ was for the latter’s graphic symmetry in typo and vector form, personal value/representation, along with an attempt to present the brand as more unorthodox on a whole.

The coloring of the logo remains in mono form. With the exception of the odd intro- ductions of color in the graphics and new content being produced, the black and white style was selected to give the logo more of a powerful, aged look, with harsh, dicern- ible contrasts. Black and white are two of the most emotive visuals in nature. Polar opposites, the two seem to stand for opposing metaphors, as well. Black is usually seen as dark: a symbol of authority and power, and, occasionally, as a symbol of evil. White is a sign of purity and brightness and of a natural innocence that combats its afore- mentioned ‘opponent’. The real benefit of these two shades is to meld together in a contrasting design. Using such a stark dichotomy, you immediately establish a dynamic in the design that is impossible for the viewer to ignore. It is clean, can be either simple or complex, and has endless opportunities that other color schemes just don’t manage to generate. It all just balances itself out.

To conclude, the logo intends to represent a bold, yet balanced cap on the brand, while suggesting depth and strong links to visual research and references through a easy to recognize, powerful image.

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THE HEAD

The Fifth World Head logo is based on secondary research snapshots of Perseus with the Head of Medusa, created by Benvenuto Cellini, completed in 1554. The Sculpture is 3.20 m high, on a square base with bronze relief panels and is located in the Loggia dei Lanzi of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, Italy. The head logo is used in more large scale platforms of the brand and is most oftern found in print form. The head represents power and authority in rising above evil and concurring your fears. It also has links to the ideology of the brand origins in a visual language.

THE STAMP

The stamp is an adaptation of the simplified version of the ‘X’ logo. The inversed fill effect of being inside the stamp gives variation to how the brand can be placed and lay- ered over alternate colours and imagery, ultimately giving more room for alternative, yet strong brand culture.The stamp is primarily used with textures or imagery leaving a clear mark of brand association and simplicity.

SIZE & SCALING

Scaling and sizing of the Fifth World logos and general artwork is relative to its dis- played platform. When working on more large scale canvases or prints for example, we can see that the size of the Brick for each logo is reduced so a reader will focus more of the art and design. Within each medium, you will also find that logos and art are scaled proportionately to each other on a multiple scale, often seen as 1x,2x, and 3x or small, regular and large. This keeps at strong house style across all types of media and consistency throughout. For a full breakdown of the relative platform sizes and scaling take a look at our print, web and apparels guidelines.

SCALING & RASTERIZATION

When scaling artwork and changing out of illustrator, artwork must always be raster- ized before exportation to maintain an even and consistent stroke. Wrongly exported artwork has the same guidelines as the improper use of a logo and must be carefully inspected before it is used.

OVERLAYING ARTWORK

Overlaying artwork must never actually overlay. Artwork must be given a second band of stoke, often white, and then eye dropped out in Photoshop to create a border of empty space between the two artwork elements. The boarder is from 1pt up to 4pt depending on artwork size.

COLOUR

Multiple colours should not be used on a single piece or collection of artwork if they are intended to be presented on a single platform. This is the Fifth World pallet that consists of colour, textures and patterns. They have been designed to be simple and loud with a contrasting weigh of grandeur and power. The primary colours are used across the entire brand, textures are used as backdrops, covers and elements of the brand world. Gradients only appear on documentation and small parts of our online presence.

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TYPEFACE

Choosing a font may seem like an arbitrary decision, but more than just personal pref- erence should be considered when choosing one, font psychology plays a big role. Fonts have been shown to influence readability. Two key categories obviously being serif and sans serif.

Serif fonts are more readable than sans serif, with readers showing faster reading speeds and greater comprehension. Fonts and font sizes that are less common, also known as disfluent fonts, have been shown to significantly improve a reader’s under- standing of a text, perhaps because the reader is forced to study each word more care- fully, forcing the brain to focus on the words and subsequently allowing it to retain the information more readily.

Fifth World has a heavy bold serif, strictly kept to mono, capitalized form and used on a large scale in comparison with core text of any given platform. This invoked a solid, bold and powerful typeface that was recognizable and gave off an ‘aged in experience’ yet modern aura.

TONE OF VOICE

Quite in the contrary to the font styling, the brand tone of voice is a conversational, relatable colloquial language, with touches of popular street brand slang and attitude.

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MOCK-UPS & DOCUMENTATION

Rather than looking at using several brand on a single garment, Fifth World expresses several logo designs from the same label on a single garment and moves away from the typical B-label view of the market. Recent designs have looked into the 8-bit style in mono form blown up to a large scale on simple bespoke apparel. Every illustration that Fifth World creates is hand drawn from scratch in illustrator, put through a refining process and then either binned or excepted.

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APPAREL, PHOTOGRAPHY & VIDEO

Here are just a few examples of the Fifth World Illustrations used across the online presence, garment and documentation. The designs themselves, are heavily influences by the steeply rising trend of brand culture and logo fashion as the line between street-wear and high end fashion has gotten significantly thinner in recent years.

Inspired by fine art and minimalism with contrasting bold grand graphics, the all black and white collection is just the beginning for Fifth World. Shot in Brunel University, the look-book shows off the recently released Essentials range, with a lot more to come. Stay tuned.

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As we continue to create new graphics and designs for the brand and, resultantly evolve as a brand, we now look to go further in appealing to countries outside of the UK or USA or support the market we sit in and develop more of an international audience and also experiment wih new meidums.

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Shot in Uxbridge, West London, the Fifth World London Promo showcases some of the new Essential Range from the brand, including the popular Black on Black Essential look tee. This is just the beginning for Fifth World as it is rumour they have lots more media related treats for us in time to come. Stay tuned!