With the launch of the new SotM website last month, one thing we really concentrated on was letting the work speak for itself. We didn’t want to clutter or overwhelm visitors with too much text and explanation. The downside is someone interested in the process and background of our work is only getting a sliver of the story. If you are interested in knowing more about our work, stay tuned because this is the first in a week long series of post about our most recent project, lifetokens.

lifetokens was officially launched last Friday (February 19th, 2010) and is already off to a wonderful start, receiving orders from all over the world in its first weekend. However the journey to that launch started several years ago when lifetokens owner, Jamie, had an idea. The idea swirled around in his head for years until finally the right moment came to see it through. In June 2009, Jamie asked me to join him for lunch to talk about a potential project. Excited about this very unique proposal, we got started soon after.

lifetokens is brand new so the first step of the project was to create its identity. Working closely with owner Jamie, we verbalized what lifetokens was to him and what it needed to become to be successful in his eyes. Words like ‘real’ and ‘emotion’ were noted, as were more concrete words like ‘mail’ and ‘bright’. Using his input, 4 concepts were developed and presented.

Concept One, The Token – Right off the bat, ‘the token’ concept was a clear favorite of ours. We liked using a ‘handwritten’ script to portray this idea of getting a real letter in the mail and the circular format of the logo was not only representative of the actual product but would also work well in the eventual branding of the product (on the mailer, on the website, etc). This concept was eventually decided against because it wasn’t strong enough for the image lifetokens needed. Something about it felt trendy and someone said it reminded them of a neon sign.

Concept Two, Overprint – The overprint concept came out of early conversations about how the tokens themselves could be designed. We had this idea to color code emotions and use this color code to overlap emotions into more complex messages. The color coded emotion thing never took off, and thus this logo never made sense as the face of lifetokens.

Concept Three, Macaroni Man – In many of our early meetings with Jamie about the identity, one idea kept coming up as what he had always envisioned for the logo. A figure holding up a lifetoken. I didn’t hate this idea but I knew we were searching for a iconic logo so the figure would have to be very stylized. Thus Macaroni Man was born. He’s kind of cute, don’t you think?

Concept Four, The Envelope – The night before our concept presentation, I revisited some of the sketches that we had done over the past week and one really stood out. It was a mailbox with a token shooting out the front and it stood out not because I liked the sketch… the sketch was awful. It stood out because it showed a very important part of what lifetokens are. Real mail. That is where the envelope concept began. A quick logo was developed which would eventually become lifetokens’ identity. Jamie’s initial reaction to it was “It has a Legend of Zelda treasure chest feel to it”. I knew we had a winner.

Bad ideas – As with any logo project, there is also a lot of failure. It is always interesting to revisit these when you’re all done to reflect on the thought process. You can’t get to the good ideas until you get the bad ones out. Right?

Logo Evolution – Now that we had our concept, it was time to polish it into something we could be happy with and build upon. A few rounds of revisions, both internally and with Jamie would lead us to our final logo. We adjusted the shape of the envelope to be more recognizable and iconic. The amazing Darden Studio’s Omnes was used because it’s bold friendly characteristics fit our concept perfectly and the primary color palette evolved from a CMY to RGB as we began designing the actual tokens.

Final Logo – Looking back now it’s hard to imagine the lifetokens logo being anything else, and I think that is a sure sign of a successful process. One thing we learned from this phase of the project specifically was the value of involving a client every step of the way. We were lucky enough to have a client who wanted to be involved and it really shows in the final product.

Now that the logo was done, we felt the hard part was over. In a way we were right, but there were still many more problems to tackle over the coming months. Stay tuned.