Logo and Company History

Aspan Telecom logo has been created for a Kazakh WiMax ISP in July 2009. Due to long delays in the communication with the client it is only today that I can showcase the logo after it was made.

Logo Idea

The simple idea for the logo was to create a classy looking “A” to be the product’s main feature.

The client asked for a strong and up-to-date looking identity so that’s where I decided to put the emphasis on the color.

Color Makes the Logo

As I know from my own experience and from some other blogs, people often underestimate the color in logos, since they create it in black and tend to leave the coloring till the end. Now while it’s okay to design in black, you should still always think about your color when designing. If you don’t feel okay with you color picking technique you can go the easy way and try Adobe’s Kuler or if you happen to own an iPhone, here’s a great app for your color picking

Paper Your Logo Down

After I picked the color that suited me, I started sketching the symbol that I needed – the capital A. The important part of it was to figure out what I want it to look like before sketching, since it saves you lots of time instead of sketching left and right, till you see something you like.

There were three main points for me on this one:

If you break your logo design down like this it makes it much easier to carry out and it also makes you look better in front of the client who realizes that you’ve actually thought it through and this project is treated professionally.

Strong Logo

I started off with line and pen tool to create a trapeze as a perfect solid shape to build my design on.

KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid

I think one of the best principles of the design I try to follow is the famous KISS which stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. One thing to add though is another quotation saying that a good design should be simple but never primitive.

With that in mind, I decided that since I started messing with trapezoids, it will be cool to carry on with trapezes so i created another one for the space between the A stands. Using Pathfinder tool, which I find one of the most useful tool in Adobe Illustrator along with Gradient Mesh, I excluded one figure from another.

Later using the same Pathfinder tool I made my A look like this:

Sophisticated Logo. Intelligent Logo

Now after struggling quite a bit and not happy with the results of what my A’s top looked like I decided to give it a gentle, sophisticated look to top the letter. After quite some adjustments and sketching done, using pen tool wasn’t too hard and the three dots finished the letter

Typeface for the Logo

After the jewel was completed, the long story began as the typeface took over a month to choose. For my logo designs I rarely make the client decide what to do with the graphic itself, but in order to keep the client happy, the typeface choosing is always involving us both, which I consider a good thing.

Eventually we chose the Officina Sans as the typeface for both English and Russian appearance.

After a while the guys at Aspan contacted me for a slight tweak of the logo and a second color.

As you can see on their webpage, they stick to the horizontal red boxed variant :-)

If you ever happen to be around Kazakhstan be sure to check them out.

Thanks for reading, till next time!

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