dache.ch

As promised, I present the second half of my two part article on the evolution of dache.ch. I hope that you found the first part to be both beneficial and informative. It was aimed mainly as a reference aid to new starters, as well as a point of interest for more well established artists in the business. For this stage, I would like to come away from the website design and overall branding of dache.ch and focus on the actual branding and logo choice to communicate the concept of dache.ch to the public. As you know a successful business relies heavily on communication. This is why having a solid logo can get you to the next stage from amateur to professional.

As explained in the first article, I did not immediately decide on the name dache to represent the business. It was more about creating an online space to display my design achievements. I therefore started by branding myself. I begun this process in 2005 and the idea of a monogram appealed, due to my initials being D.P. In lowercase, they are opposite and symmetrical and I thought it would make for a clean, tidy logo. Above you will find some of my sketches from the archives.

After many sketches and drafts, I decided a few months later to go with the capital D and inset P.  As I was still finalising my studies at Art and Communication College, I used the above brand to sign off all of my work and later used this to survey the success of the logo as a brand. In hindsight, it was simple and effective but not what I was looking for to represent the business that I would create. I chose the colours, red and white, for the simple fact that they are the colours of the Swiss flag.

After this stage, I decided to go forward with my business and had to choose a name. David Pache did not really work for me, as I preferred a short name. As a child, I was nicknamed “dache”, therefore I decided to take this idea forward and it remains the name of the business today. I am very happy with my choice.

With this aspect decided upon, I started the initial sketching of the company logo. Based loosely around my signature, below are the initial options which I came up with. All of these were based on the idea of lettering, with the “d” in lowercase as the main symbol and the name underneath.

Below is a progression of my ideas and I looked into discarding the symbol and just using the name as the logo. I like to design fonts and sampled a few ideas at this stage to gain some perspective of how the font could change the influence of the logo. After some time, I looked at a symbol with dache.ch

It should be said that at this point, I literally opened my imagination up to any ideas until i found the correct one for me and the business. This is why there is not a natural progression of continuity of the design path. I found that this approach worked well, as it meant i was not limited to changing the same idea multiple times, which was economic and I still use the same method on my client projects to this day.

After taking the typeface ideas as far as I could, I was not happy and looked again at the symbol, this time looking at a separate, non-typeface based symbol. I have always been a great fan of geometric shapes in design. I looked at the Swiss Flag again for inspiration and played around with a few colour variations. The red and white appealed to me to be the base colours for the logo, as it retained a personal part of my identity, being Swiss, but without being too obvious as my initials.

Using the cross symbol from the flag, I sketched them as a group of four, creating a box. By this time, I had come up with the tag line for the business which was - “out of the box” thinking, Swiss style. I was still after a cleaner line to the logo therefore after a few more drafts, used the cross on one corner of the box (which made it appear to be going “out of the box”) and had finally found the logo which would be used for dache.ch

This was the difficult part over. I now had to decide on a font to correctly suit the symbol which I had designed. I remained with the Swiss market and narrowed my font choice down to four, which were by Swiss and German typographers. These are shown below with the brown background. I eventually decided that Helvetica was the most neutral font of the four and I did not want the font to compete in any way with the symbol, but rather to complement it. I think the simplicity of the logo coupled with that of the Helvetica font make a very nice combination and fit my initial brief.

I did tweak the font slightly once selected, making the curved stem of the “a” straight, purely for continuity.

Above, you will note that the text which I used in the initial design was “dache.ch”. The “.ch” was then dropped, as it was the actual website and not the URL which was the intended focus. Below is the finished logo for dache.ch. It sums up for me the intended direction of the business; to provide out of the box design, Swiss style.

Maybe you think I could have done something differently? Maybe you would like to comment generally on the article? I am interested to hear any feedback and look forward to interacting with you soon.

Many thanks
David