Behind the Design: the Pop Art Logo

In July of 2006, Pop Art’s President, Steve Rosenbaum, commissioned the Pop Art design team to develop new marketing materials to coincide with our move to a new office space. During this process, Pop Art’s existing logo was called into question, and the design team set out to develop a new logo.

The new logo reflects our passion, creativity, style, and attitude as we carry out the principles of the Pop Art movement with a unique brand of explosive creativity.

The first pass was just throwing some ideas at the wall. My goal was to create something cleaner than the existing logo, something that would work better across media, at small sizes, and in different uses (the old one was tough to use on dark backgrounds). Additionally, our new location gave us the opportunity to have a large vertical sign, which the old logo wasn’t well-suited for. I wrote down a bunch of words, but the one that seemed to stick was this idea of “expansion” and that of the logo literally popping from being over-inflated. A personal favorite from this round was logo D. I thought it was clever to use the ® mark as part of the logo as a comment on the commercial nature of our work. Clever, but a little obvious.

In round 2, I refined the exploding/expansion idea further and ended up with logo A. Yes, I know the font is Bank Gothic, and yes, I know what a cliche font it is. The intention was to get an idea across and work on refining things like the font a little later. Ben created logo E, which I thought was a lot of fun, playing on the expansion idea in more of an entropy/Big Bang sense, with concentric rings that could represent sound or percussion waves. The use of Helvetica seems very appropriate to the commercial use of this logo. Intern Tom Solitt threw out something that we all thought was a great idea – a bottle cap logo (C). I liked the idea of opening something to release the good stuff – a pretty good metaphor for what we do. Web projects are often all about getting information from behind the corporate firewall and into the eager public’s hands. Steve’s personal idea (and an interesting one, at that) was to appropriate another company’s logo in a different context as Warhol did in the transition from soup to fine art. Logo B is inspired by Toys R Us’ logo. The old logo (F, if you’re playing at home) was inspired by the Tide detergent logo.

After this round, we sent the contenders out to Pop Art’s entire staff for their thoughts. Each team member was asked to pick their 3 favorites in order of importance. My logo was chosen, with a lot of support coming from our development team (who liked the “high tech” look of Bank Gothic).

For further evaluation, we placed the bake-off winner among some local and national companies in the same mind-space, to use some jargon, and the team felt we were headed in the right direction visually, since the new logo could easily compete visually.

Still, Steve was unsure this version was exactly right, and he asked me to go back to the drawing board for some more exploration. I spent an afternoon at home with pen and sketchpad, and did quite a bit of doodling. Here were a few favorites (or if you’re really crazy, download a PDF of my sketches to the tune of 6.1MB).

Steve, Justin and I all got together to review the sketches I’d done, and selected a few to elaborate further on. All of us were pretty much in agreement on the below sketches and felt we were getting really close.

We selected logos A and E for final polish and elected to view them in context. This seems like a no-brainer, but none of us had really gone through this step in a logo process before and I feel it’s worth repeating. I was initially drawn to logo E, but after seeing it in context on business cards (below) and in other venues (Here’s a PDF of the PA web site and our forthcoming media kit, 884KB), I was sold on logo A. And so was the rest of the team.

With a little more tweaking, a little more kerning, and developing a full range of logo uses, we were finally there. Er … here. Interestingly, Chank’s Adrianna font from round 1 is used in the final logo (a great compromise between business and fun), and I incorporated Ben’s early CMYK idea in some of the identity materials we developed (hence the logo on those background colors.