Health and safety expert, Stephen Edwards, recently contacted me after setting up his new consultancy business and asked me to create a brand new corporate identity starting with a new logotype
About the Company
The new company, Validus Safety Ltd, will provide health and safety services to clients ranging from large corporations to start-up small businesses across the United Kingdom. Stephen and his team aim to make Quality and Environmental Compliance an important part of your business. All the team have possess strong technical know-how and vast experience in the industry.
The Design – Steve’s Brief
Yet again I was fortunate to have been given full freedom with the designs above. Steve basically said he wanted an up-to-date modern logo design that portrayed the professionalism and dedication that his has towards his work. He wanted to concentrate mainly on sans-serif fonts and avoid fussy traditional serif typefaces such as Times and Garamond. Although I have featured two fonts in my designs that could be classed as serif fonts I think they are contemporary enough to be acceptable.
While trying to think of a way to symbolised health and safety with a graphic object I quickly realised it was going to be difficult. It covers so many different aspects of business that there isn’t really a simple one-size-fits-all solution. So I tuned my attention to various arrangements of the “V” in different settings. In some cases it doubled up as a tick mark which is widely considered to be a positive symbol. I experimented with a variety of serious colour schemes ranging from deep reds to hues of blue and green.
Individual Logo Overview
- The deep “British Racing Green” textured background on this first option helps to lift the lettering, with help from a subtle drop-shadow, off the page. The arrangement of vertical lime green lines in a “V” shape with one highlighted in white symbolises how Steve and his team will identify potential problems and then solve them. The font used here is Baumans regular.
- There isn’t anything too complicated about this particular concept. A red diamond shape with a “V” cut-out sits atop the main lettering in cool-black and is set in Philosopher regular font.
- I decided to go for a more dramatic look with this design using bold colours and an ultra-modern “Audiowide” font. I experimented with quite a few different options for the graphic on this one. It began with an arrangement of two shapes above the lettering and I eventually settled with the ellipse surrounding the “V-style tick” you can see inside set to the left of the wording.
- Clean and simple is the name of the game with this concept. Two shades of blue, cyan (hex #00BDE3) and Lapis lazuli blue (hex #0079A0) for the main elements. A hexagon with “V” cut-out sits above the main lettering set in Museo 500 font.
- After playing around with a variety of positions for the main graphic on this logo I settled on a simple and straight forward centred arrangement. This evolved into a clean straight to the point style logo. I created a simple gradient background to add depth and applied a soft 1px drop-shadow and white fill to the main elements. Again a “V” shape that could double up as a “tick-mark” sits on top of the lettering which is set in Julius Sans One font.
- I really stripped everything back with this design, I decided that any more work than the obvious lob-sided “V” / tick-mark would have been too much. I used Syncopate bold for the main lettering and Syncopate regular for the “safety consultancy” underneath.
- A Carmine red triangle with “Vs” white cut-out letters is positioned to the left of the main lettering all set in Expletus Sans font.
- I’m quite pleased with the way the rainbow effect transparent bold “V” ribbon turned out here. It works well with the font I opted for, Maven Pro, against the crisp white background.
- Validus is a fictional character from DC Comics and a member of the Fatal Five. I’m not sure whether this is where inspiration for the name of the business came from but I did some research I noted the characters’ colour scheme. I replicated it here in a round-about way, purple lettering, again using Maven Pro, light grey “safety consultants” against a dark grey textured background.
Well that’s as much as I can say about my designs for now without boring you all to death. I hope you see something here that you like and my explanation of the project has been clear and easy to understand. If you would like to leave some feedback to help Stephen in his decision making then please do so in the comments box below.
Thanks!