I’ve been working on the Codeistry ‘corporate look and feel’ recently and I wanted to discuss the design process a bit and show some of the alternative ideas I went through on the way to the final designs.

My general design preference is for simplicity and elegance, if possible. I also wanted a design which would work well on the web, as this is primarily a web based company. I decided that I wanted a simple logotype for the logo and a set of colours and fonts that would work well with it, for both print and web. I’ll talk about the colour choices in a separate post and just concentrate on the font choices here.

The portmanteau name ‘Codeistry’ lends itself to a two font logotype, with each part of the name picked out in an appropriate looking font. Something computery and technical looking for the ‘code’ bit and something softer and more arty for the (art)istry bit. I played around with this idea for a while, with different fonts, combinations, weights and kerning.

I eventually ended up with this one:

This uses Tahoma for ‘code’ and Candara for ‘istry’. The Candara bit is condensed, with the tracking set to -20 ems/1000, and then I’ve manually played around with the kerning on the whole thing from there. I had to fiddle with the font sizes and spacing by eye to get it to look like a coherent whole – the Tahoma section ended up being 84.95% of the font size of the Candara section.

I chose the fonts because they worked well together, having a similar humanist san-serif look and fairly similar weighting. The Tahoma gives a subtle technical look to the ‘code’ bit while the Candara looks more arty, with its gentle curves and slightly hand brushed feel. I felt that some of the other alternatives, like the top one in the first image, were a bit too dissimilar and made the name start to look like an obvious pun. Tahoma also has the advantage of being available on almost everyones computer, if I wanted to use it for web work.

That just left me to decide on fonts to use for other copy – the headings and text for the codeistry website and any print material. The choice of these fonts was influenced by my choice of colours as this all feeds into the overall feel – so I’ll cover that in a follow-up post, after I’ve talked about the colours.