Student Project: Hadley Garden Centre Logo Redesign
When I was studying graphic design one of the projects I worked on was redesigning a logo. This is the project brief I recieved:
“Hadley Garden Centre would like a new logo. They have been in business for many years and have positioned themselves in the market as the BMW/ Waitrose of Garden Centres. Their staff is very knowledgeable and they have a high number of staff who have been with them for many years. They would like to think their staff are proud to work for them. Their target market is older adults, perhaps in their 40’s but mostly older.
Their current logo is text in a green ellipse. They want to avoid the cliche leaf image as they want to increase awareness of their non plant products such as giftware, furniture, kitchenware etc. Create 3 logo options – two colour only. One based on the idea of text in an elipse (but fairly modern). The other 2 options can go in any direction you feel appropriate to the market.” - graphicdesignblog.co.uk
I imagine the original logo probably would have looked somewhat like this:
Like all good logo designers I sketched out ideas before choosing the concepts to produce digitally.
Here is the first logo option, a modern version of the original logo. This is how I would update the original logo to steer people away from associating Hadley Garden Centre solely with plants & garden products without altering the original idea too much.
The assignment is for a two color logo, but I thought it might be nice to see what the logo would look like with a bit more depth.
For the other two options, at first I chose the triple shapes and round/oval with swirls concepts. But while producing the oval with swirls concept I realized that the swirls may be associated with vines or plants instead of elegance and that wouldn’t help the company move away from being associated with only garden related products.
Since I wasn’t going to use those, I began thinking about other concepts. I decided to go with single shapes that could be used alone or with text to form the company name.
Depending on how far the client wanted to deviate from the original design & what they wanted to emphasize, I would choose the most appropriate shape and present a few concepts to the client.
If they wanted to keep the essence of the original design I’d present these concepts:
If they wanted to emphasize their home furnishing products I’d present these concepts:
And if they wanted something different from the original but didn’t want to emphasize the home concept, I’d present these:
Here are the final three logo options I chose for this project:
