The 4-person Twin Cities improv troupe Ice Cream Social Club was looking for a way to spice up their social media presence with a logo, but the process isn’t as simple as doodling an icon and calling it a day. This is the story of how we went from “we need a logo” to a colorful brand package that really stands out.
Step 1: Inspiration
In order to fully satisfy the client, I need to know what the client likes. For that reason, the first step in the creation process has nothing to do with me. I asked Ice Cream Social Club to create a mood board on Pinterest to show me fonts, colors, logos, and textures that caught their eyes. I gave them a few weeks to scour the internet — not for things they want to replicate, but solely for things they found appealing.
What I gathered from this mood board was that they liked vibrant colors and round shapes. Favorable fonts seemed to be a mixture of clean light weights and stylized cursives. With all these reference pictures, I was ready to bring it all together.
Step 2: The Font
This is an improv troupe, not a multi-billion dollar corporation. They don’t have the budget for an entirely original font, and there’s no need to create one when there are so many free options available! So I typed out their group name and scrolled through the an endless supply of fonts that were either clean and lightweight or cursive and round.
I narrowed down my options to these 6, and the troupe was really happy with the bottom option. I was really happy that they liked something from the first batch! We could have talked about fonts for years, so it’s always a relief when a decision is made so quickly.
Step 3: The Icon
We knew from the beginning that their icon was going to be some form of ice cream — duh! But would it be in a cone? A bowl? A glass? Spilled on the floor? There are so many options! So, as always, I drew them all out in the hopes that something would stick.
I could tell that my hands were favoring a simple ice cream cone shape with a circle for the main piece and three smaller circles at the bottom to make it look like it was scooped onto a triangular waffle cone. The glasses, bowls, and crests were valiant efforts, but in 2020, simplicity is key. It was time to move on to the computer.
The top left image was my first attempt, and I was quite proud…until I realized it doesn’t work. Why doesn’t it work? Because it’s in full color! If you change the blue and yellow to black or white, there is nothing to separate the top piece from the bottom piece, which makes it look more like a microphone or a lollipop! Every great logo needs to be recognizable without color, so I needed some way to separate the scoop from the cone.
Adding a simple stroke around the image wasn’t enough for me. I had to experiment a bit until I realized the cone and the scoop did not need to be connected at all! With that tiny little gap between the top and bottom, the logo now works in any color.
Step 4: Brand Guidelines
Post the icon and the font and call it a day, right? WRONG! To make your brand truly stand out, you need to understand how to use it properly. You can hire graphic designers to make “pretty things,” but if you don’t understand how those “pretty things” relate to one another, you can accidentally make your brand look worse. For instance: if the ice cream icon is too small next to the logotype, and the colors are all mismatched, it doesn’t quite capture the right look and feel.
To prevent any confusion, I created a Branding Guidelines PDF that the troupe can reference any time they’re using their new colors, fonts, and logos. It spells out the whats and whys of their brand, so they don’t need to hire a marketing specialist every time they have something new to promote.
Ice Cream Social Club used their new brand to promote their 4 am performance at the 2020 Virtual Improvathon (48 straight hours of improv to raise money for HUGE Theater), and they were 2nd in most donations earned!
You can check out their new look on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.