Sixteen Three is a company that does upscale equestrian interiors. The name refers to the optimal height for a race horse, being sixteen hands and three (fingers? inches?) tall. Because they are a numbered name there are a ton of problems to deal with off the bat with regards to identity and marketing. The client wanted to appeal to an affluent client.
My educational background is from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The Art Center way is (or was, at the time) to come up with fifty solutions to every problem before you even begin to "solve" the problem. Because of that, I start every project in a notebook and a lot of garbage is made before any rough diamonds are found. There were two marks that could have gone to finish in the end. I'll explain my decisions along the way below. Hopefully these sketches will help you understand some of the creative and pragmatic decisions that go into identity solving.
My educational background is from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The Art Center way is (or was, at the time) to come up with fifty solutions to every problem before you even begin to "solve" the problem. Because of that, I start every project in a notebook and a lot of garbage is made before any rough diamonds are found. There were two marks that could have gone to finish in the end. I'll explain my decisions along the way below. Hopefully these sketches will help you understand some of the creative and pragmatic decisions that go into identity solving.
some geometric and numeral sketches to begin with. often it helps just to start getting some information on the page and get rid of some of the obvious stuff. initially i played with trying to indicate height.
in abstracting the numbers i came up with a few directions i liked. the number sixteen that was made in three strokes is something that comes up again later.
this is what happens when you rely on logo books too much. the second step in my process, after i've exhausted my stuff, is to go to my reference library and start interpreting the problem through a different lens.
there's something sort of charming and alien about this Escher-like 163. The client may have even liked it but it was too xbox, kid-core for their market and we quickly shut it down.
i thought of maybe doing a lyrical illustration, as i did for Duckling. that would certainly be an option. the duckling logo was way too much work and i wanted to avoid that in order to not repeat myself or trap myself in vector hell, adjusting curves and line weights. another direction we could have gone in would have been a very artsy calligraphy of a wordmark.
the three in the sixteen returns.
i once had a colleague of mine accuse me of having Japanese tendencies in my design work. adding a loose brush version of the sixteen broken in three is one of the two directions this mark could have gone. abstracting it a little more would have been very beautiful in a very dry brush stroke.
you can solve most of your design problems with 20th century art history. the final direction for Sixteen Three was to come back to the horse. The name was almost useless from a marketing pov. Nobody would know what it referred to and in order to drive their message home we needed to emphasize that they did work for equestrian clients.
here i'm taking some cues from Calder as well as i think the movie bumper used by Pathe films. this modernist construction of triangles coming together to form a horse speaks to the fabrication that the client does. the trick was to find the right balance to make the animal out of sixteen triangles. with, of course, three circles.
from here, the drawings got scanned into the computer and i went into variations from there.
here i'm taking some cues from Calder as well as i think the movie bumper used by Pathe films. this modernist construction of triangles coming together to form a horse speaks to the fabrication that the client does. the trick was to find the right balance to make the animal out of sixteen triangles. with, of course, three circles.
from here, the drawings got scanned into the computer and i went into variations from there.
the final mark.
Much to my sorrow, the company incorporated and changed its name shortly after this logo was completed. So, it's never seen the light of day.
