Crosswater Brief

After the anatomy of type lecture today we were given this brief and for it we have to rebrand a company using only typography from the 6 different Vignellis typefaces in a group of 5 people. We got the 'crosswater' which is a luxury bathroom company in leeds, it creates, designs and sells expensive top end bathrooms. From researching the company we quickly realised that the target market for the company is a high end, middle class, gender neutral couple, this meant the design needed to be kept sophisticated yet simple. The main theme we need to keep in mind with this rebrand will be ; Vignellis 6 typefaces, modern, futuristic, simple, flat, cool colour scheme and minimalism. We've looked at the styles of futurist designs the company creates along with it target market and prices to come up with these main features. Below is all the different styles of fonts that are produced from the word crosswater in Futura typeface, this is one of our given fonts and i feel it fits the brief best as it san serif so modern yet also simple and minimalistic which works. i experimented with all the different fonts from this typeface to see how they worked for bold, caps and italics so we had a way to compare them all at once. To get our initial ideas down first we drew a mind map to let us get down everything we where think before we started any designing, we worked as a group to create this and wrote down everything we had in mind for a starting point. This will give us a direct way to work from the start and what we need to research before we start.   

Colour Ideas

For the colour we wan to keep it simple to greys, blues and white, experimenting between them later on, this came from looking into the current website and the colour that are seen mostly in the products . blue will work to help it be easily recognised as water and bathrooms, as this is the colour associated with it, also a lot of other bathroom companies because of this so it will work for our reband. As blue is also used in lots of other design of bathrooms logos people will associated this colour with bathroom shops straight away meaning they have a idea of the brand without having to research. (navy/light blue might work better as it more classic so will appeal to an older audience we will test more colour schemes later on) . The idea of white came from wanting a classic, clean simple look this is hows its used a lot in the work of the company too, to draw attention to space around words as much as words. As well as this it will also make the over colours stand out well and it is a main colour used in the designs of the bathrooms the company produces. The company says it very proudly British so using white and blue will help reflects the colours in the union jack, supporting the mission statement. Grey is a clean colour again, its also used alot in the bathroom designs as metal is a main aspect of the futurist new design so i feel it'll work and is good to reflect.   

Vignellis 6 typefaces

For the project, our group first wanted us to look at the Vignellis 6 typefaces as these are the only types we can use, this is a Vignellis has a theory that these are the only typefaces designers need. He believes that changing or adjusting these types is enough and others are just trash (quote below). Although i slightly agree with this quote i feel its very narrow minded in the new digital age, people are creating type everyday and to just dismiss this because you think you've found the perfect 6 is stupid and offensive to the designers. Type has new uses in the age and we are constantly changing why and how we use type so they type needs to change with it. As i said i do slightly agree, this is because i feel type uses a few basic features and comes from a few different basic fonts designed that are edited in to new typefaces but they all have the same basic roots. 

Vignellis 6 typefaces are:

Garamord

Bodori

Century Expanded

Futura

Times Roman

Helvetica 

After getting the typefaces we decided that we needed to see how each typeface looks in the word 'cross water', in all the different fonts, bold, italics, and light. This will give us an idea of what we have to work with and will allow us to see how the type works, the name needs to be included as its a important for the company to rebrand completely and the name is a vital part of this. Instead of doing this each we all took a typeface and made the fonts on a document so we could see how it worked then compare the different styles we had to work with tomorrow in college, i got futura and this is the type. 

I think this type works for the brief as its simple, minimal yet also relevant and very popular at the moment, the sans serif style makes it a lot more current to the styles and ideas that the shop wants to show. The best font of this typeface is the capitals in my opinion but we will have to constancy experiment later on with ideas and designs to find out what works best with different idea and 

rebrands. I've also added the Helivica one that polly did, these let us compare side by side the fonts to see which we like and which we don't, also this mean we could have a bank of useful fonts and starting points as we have a collection of everything we are allowed to use for this brief.