SPOT Branding: Bold and Approachable
This is SPOT
SPOT isn’t a real service. It’s born from a mock brief from www.goodbrief.io
Here’s what I got from goodbrief:
We are SPOT, a company that inspires new ways to stream movies by combining big ideas with ease of use. Our main product is an app that implements new creative technologies. Our target audience are millennials. We want to convey a sense of bravery, while at the same time being down to earth.
This is a branding exercise, where I show my thought process and rationale for the SPOT logo and colours. I’ve recently done a write up on the UX for SPOT (and streaming services in general) you can find that here.
The logo
When ideating for the logo, I wanted to convey a sense of bravery or boldness, keep it creative, and still remain down to earth. Playing around with keywords I decided to shave it down to two: bold but approachable.
The target audience are millennials and this is a video platform, so I did an image search for “90’s TV Show Logos” for some inspiration. I found some big and splashy logos with odd-sized letters. I wanted to recreate the feel of these logos, but the target audience has grown up now so I wanted to make SPOT’s logo a bit more sophisticated and cleaned up to reflect that.
When doing my initial sketches for this logo I worked with triangles, circles and squares, but decided that constraining it to a square shape would make it look BIG even when small and easy to fit into any design work I do later.
The box around the outside makes the logo fill up the space looking full and confident. As a bonus, this shape alludes to television sets, without being a TV shaped box.
To give the logo more personality I inserted the sideways triangle. It’s a play button and also a homage to the shapes incorporated into the Saved By The Bell image.
The typeface is custom drawn, with inspiration from Impact. Again, bold! To make it more creative, fun, and approachable and tip my hat to the 90’s logos I varied the sizes of the letters and slightly overlapped them.
Brand colours
When I looked at the competition, I realised that most video streaming services are using darker colour schemes- there is always some kind of heavy black. I wanted to incorporate this into my palette as a primary colour, but steer away from working entirely in black: SPOT is approachable, so most screens will be done in a lighter scheme.
My second primary colour is a very light khaki– it’s a neutral colour, not white, and calms all of the other accent colours.
My “secondary colour” will take centre stage in contrast to the two more neutral primary colours. It is a dark cyan as a subtle nod to the bright blues in my inspiration logos. It’s a more sophisticated and confident version of a loud and brash colour- the greeny-blue is both brave and down to earth.
My accent colours were chosen to pop off of all the other colours. They are pastel versions of bold colours taken from my logo inspiration. The bright magenta and blue are classic superhero colours, alluding to bravery. They also add creativity, and conflict to a palette that would be drab without them.
After I built the palette I created a few mock-ups of how it could be used in a UI to verify that everything worked well together.
Thanks
This is all the work I’ve done defining the SPOT brand for now- but it’s not all I’ve done with SPOT.
I have a case study about designing the UX for SPOT available as well. There's a quite a bit in there not just about the brand, but also about film streaming services in general. Check it out.
