Case study Logo design
Client TreeHugger Mums
Brief
TreeHugger Mums is a parenting website which sells a range of eco-friendly and ethical products for parents and babies, as well as providing parenting information. The owners describe it as ‘a thoroughly modern company, bringing traditional parenting right into the 21st Century. If THM was a car, it would be the Toyota Prius hybrid car – environmentally friendly, but not ‘hippy-ish’, and completely at ease in modern life’.
To coincide with a website redesign and the opening of THM’s first high street store we were asked to work on a redesign of the THM logo.
The brief stipulated that the logo should be suitable for use on the website and on printed materials and that it should be a fresh, modern, clean design, with white and green as the primary colours used. Two elements were required which could either be used separately or together depending upon the media.
The first element was a one-colour reversible round logo to represent ‘TreeHugger’ This needed to appear flowing and graceful, suggesting ideas such as caring, nurturing, natural and family.
The second element was the text ‘TreeHugger Mums’. It was specified that the word ‘TreeHugger’ should be plain and neutral while ‘Mums’ should be in a feminine colour and have some additional styling added to represent motherhood and fertility.
Execution
The logo design package chosen by the client offered them three initial ideas to select from. The tight brief meant that coming up with three different routes was potentially tricky but eventually three routes were finalised.
Route 1 This incorporated an attractive stylised leaf shape used within a circle as specified by the brief. The text element consisted of the word ‘Treehugger’ in black Book Antiqua - a solid and easy to read font - with ‘Mums’ in soft green Bickham Script Pro finished with a tiny leaf to mirror the round logo.
Route 2 The round symbol used here suggested various natural elements such as trees, waves or wind. The font chosen for the text was Myriad Pro with the final ‘s’ modified to represent the stem of a flower – a flower head was added in pink as a finishing touch.
Route 3 A more organic round symbol was the basis for this route, with soft line drawn branches and leaves forming the required circle. The text was set in Perpetua in charcoal grey and Snell Roundhand Script in soft lilac, with a branch from the main logo intertwined among the letters.
The client's feedback to the initial designs was very positive and after some consideration they chose to pursue Route 1. Several alterations were requested and it was also agreed that the text was not quite working. A number of options were explored before we came to the conclusion that the lack of success was due to there being too many elements fighting with each other. It was therefore decided to go for a more simplified look and based on this we chose to use the font from Route 3 (Perpetua Titling) in charcoal grey throughout with all of the text on one line and the round logo alongside.
Result
The finished logo fulfils the original brief perfectly with the exception of the word ‘Mums’. However this is a perfect example of a client’s willingness to be flexible and accept that sometimes what they’ve envisaged will not work in practice. By making the word ‘Mums’ too decorative/feminine there was a danger that the whole design could lose its freshness and begin to look cluttered and confusing. Simplifying this meant the logo worked much better - both as individual elements and as a whole - retaining the clean, modern look that was initially requested.
What the client said
'Huge thanks to Jess from www.greensanddesign.co.uk for the fantastic new logo that she designed for us. We gave Jess a pretty tough brief, and she's come up with a beautiful new logo which met our brief perfectly. And she was a delight to work with!'
Click here to see the finished TreeHugger Mums logo
