Turf Company Logo Design Options

A local grower of lawn turf that is supplied to golf courses, cricket grounds, football & rugby clubs and other outdoor sporting venues, needed a brand identity design for their new website and I was very happy to take on the task for them

I’ve started with the logo design and I’ll explain a little about the process and the company itself below, so please read on and tell me which logo you like best in the comments box at the bottom of the page!

About the company

The idea for the name of the business came from Jonathan Guy of Aqueous Digital, a very decent chap I have had the pleasure of working with on a number of projects now. He was having a brainstorming meeting with Hazel Frith, the managing director of Allturf and they were trying to think of a better way to market the trade side of the business. “Allturf Trade”, Jonathan said, “Great” said Hazel, so he checked if the domain was available and to their delight is was!

Allturf supply various types of lawn turf to sporting and development sites across the North West of England. Its a family run business based just outside Knutsford in Cheshire. They use the latest sustainable techniques for growing grass turf for all kinds of settings from roof tops to lawns, bowling greens to wildflower meadows and just about anywhere you could imagine grass will grow.

The Logo Design Project

The vast majority of green keepers, building site managers and groundsmen in the UK are men so the new site will be geared to a mostly male audience. With this in mind the colours used needed to be natural, muted earthy shades and slightly masculine if possible. Feminine shades such as pinks and purples were to be avoided, but you wouldn’t usually associate pink with grass anyway so that was fine.

I was introduced to Hazel by Jonathan and after a brief chat with her it was clear which approach would be best with the logo design. Hazel explained she wanted a traditional, close to nature image with a contemporary twist. Her company is at the forefront of the turfing world and the new logo needed to reflect this somehow.

I’m not ashamed to say I really enjoy working in the garden and I’m a big fan of a well kept lawn so I was quite looking forward to getting started with this new project. My family, friends and neighbours will tell you I had one of the best kept lawns on our street up until our little boy was born earlier this year. So now with 2 kids and more work than I can shake a stick, or should I say lawn mower at, I’m afraid our garden has been somewhat neglected.

Anyway, back to the logo. I asked Hazel if she could come up with some ideas for a suitable tag-line to go with the logo. She sent a list with some really good lines that helped get the ideas flowing. Using these tag-lines as a guide I came up with a few myself. I wouldn’t normally do things this way round but this time it just worked out better. It was good inspiration and helped me get a good picture in my mind about how I wanted the designs to look.

Next I narrowed the slogan tag-lines down to just a few and lay them out on my art-board. I took to pen and pad and started sketching out shapes and lettering arrangement ideas. A visit to some of my favourite sources of inspiration next including Designinspiration which features all kinds of design ideas and good old Dribbble which is great for colour visualizing and graphics ideas.

The logo is primarily needed for the header of the new website so I was fairly settled on a long shallow shape overall. This would enable the lettering to be clearly visible at a good size and not adversely affect the height of the website header. After choosing the fonts from both my own library and the fantastic library of free fonts available from Google I was ready to start painting up the designs with some colour and texture.

Each logo explained in detail

1. A clean rectangular box painted with a dark green ( #0A4C18 ) gradient background, Signika font, “Grown to Perform” tag-line in Qwigley font and thin blades of grass gowing around the base.

2. Fonts used here are Formata and Enriqueta bold for the word “TRADE”. A heavily blurred photo from Augusta, golfers will know, makes the background. An isometric illustrated, by me, roll of turf sits jutting out of double bordered disc shape.

3. A sloping mowed area of grass inside a shield device with blue-green heavy border ( #006666 ), again illustrated by me is placed to the left of the main lettering. Fonts used ChunkFive Regular and Philosopher italic for the tag-line.

4. I’ve taken a slightly rustic angle with this design particularly with the background which I made up in Photoshop using a grass texture, Gaussian blurred to a value of about 20 and then applied the sandstone texture effect. Fonts are Kreon and Candara and the graphic is made up with a few silhouetted blades of grass blowing in the breeze.

5. This one started out as two different logos I originally sketched. When I drew up the turf cross section it was looking too much like something off the side of a “lawn food” box. So I placed the slab with the lettering over the top, fixed the colours and wrapped it with a key-line. Fonts are Kaushan Script and Swiss for the tag-line.

6. Using a flag graphic was always going to look skewed towards golf courses, so I kept it simple, I didn’t put a number on the flag or stripe on the pole. I kept it simple with the fonts and colours too, Ubuntu bold italic and light italic for the slogan and only 2 shades of green ( #347A29 & #8FC239 ).

7. Introducing a cool dark blue background with this design helped lift the main elements of the logo off the page. I drew up a neatly cut lawn, dropped it into a double bordered ellipse and placed it next to the lettering. Fonts used here are Maven Pro. I was also quite pleased with the tag-line “we do the growing, you do the mowing”.

8. Organic is the theme with this logo. A fresh organic green panel surrounds a simple dark grey ellipse with silhouetted grass and clean grey and white lettering. Fonts used are Expletus Sans for Alltrade Turf and Cabin for the tag-line.

9. For the final option I thought I might try something more industrial. The arched dark green panel is supposed to be metal slab fixed to the background with four screws. I used 2 main shades of green that contrast and compliment each other. A flash of cherry red works well for the word “trade” set in Formatta and Cherry Swash font.

Well I do hope you’ve seen at least one logo that you like. Its not as easy as you might think to put together designs like these. Quite a lot of effort sketching, drawing, colouring and trying different font styles goes into making the logos you see above. I therefore would very much appreciate your time to leave a quick comment in the box below and tell my which logo or logos you like best.

As always thanks very much for all your feedback, thoughts and suggestions. 🙂