New branding for Flying Kiwi Parasail

December 6th, 2011 • Comments Off Graphic Design, Marketing
Tags: bay of islands, branding, Graphic Design, Marketing

Langford Ink has been working with the Flying Kiwi Parasail team over the past few months, shaping up a new logo for them, tweaking their brochure and – finally – setting up a new website that is easy to update, search engine friendly and looks fresh, bright and accessible to all.

We’ve been working to a fairly strict budget, so the challenge has been to get a great new look on a fairly short shoe string.

First, the logo. What you see here, top right, is the result of some old fashioned sketching and few design iterations. The client was a pleasure to work with because they had a fairly good idea of what they wanted, were prepared to put in the effort to communicate that, but weren’t closed to alternative ideas and reasoning.

The team already had a cool parasailing kiwi cartoon, which they loved, but he was prohibitively expensive to print. Apart from this little chap, there wasn’t much in the way of consistent branding other than a font type used on the staff hoodies and, more recently, splashed across the new bright orange, custom-designed boat.

Game on — we had a brief: a very orange boat with the word PARASAIL in big blue letters down the side.

We were also given this sketch on a black and white photocopy of the staff hoodie, to show the idea of a kiwi being incorporated into the logo. From this starting point, we developed a series of options.

In good old fashioned graphic design style, we chopped up the different concepts, and mixed and matched until we got to a literally cut-and-pasted brief.

And now we’re getting close to a logo: we have a faded silhouette of the flying kiwi, a little bit abstract, but definitely of Aotearoa extraction; we have a typeface that ties in with the boat signwriting; we have the words Paihia and New Zealand included in the logo. The overriding feature is descriptive – the word parasail leaps out at you – but there’s also a more interesting visual language building up.

So from here, we came up with the almost final version, a blue logo with the words Bay of Islands, rather than Paihia.

And then, finally, because the team actually really like that zingy orange colour of their boat, we settled on the orange fade as the main iteration of the Flying Kiwi Parasail logo.

The J Range: CMC Design

January 3rd, 2011 • Comments Off Copywriting, Graphic Design
Tags: branding, Graphic Design, Marketing

For more information on Craig’s furniture see www.cmcdesign.co.nz or email info@cmcdesign.co.nz