Concept : National Championships Emblem

Here is a concept I made for the Canadian Soccer Association National Championship. Unfortunately the emblem was declined and never used. The difficulty in this project was all the elements that needed to be incorporated i.e. both french and english title, the Canada Soccer logo, the year, the two sponsors and a reference to soccer.

 Copyright Canada Soccer 2013, by Dany Pépin

A new identity for Octave Communications

Octave Communications, a Canadian engineering consulting firm that specializes in radio broadcasting and telecommunications, has hired me to create a visual identity for their company earlier this year.

The logo is based on a circle, which represent infinity and integrity. Further more, the center of the letter « O » is the emitting source of the radio waves (orange arcs) roaming through the air in reference to the engineering services offered by the company. The interrupted circular arcs in the shape of the letter « C » (for the word « communications ») along with the letter « O » from Octave can be use without the typography as a secondary and more stripped down logo. The colour orange was chosen for its energy, vitality and movement.

In the upcoming weeks, I will also post the business cards I created for Octave Communications along with the first version of their new website.

Other tentative logos that didn’t make it.

Collectible cards store identity

The guys at Collect-Edition, a collectible card store located in La Prairie (South shore of Montreal), hired me to develop their new identity. Collect-Edition focuses primarely on sports cards (mainly hockey) and a good portion of the store is dedicated to collectible card game (CCG) such as Magic: the Gathering, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, etc.

They needed a identity that would represent their small business and would speak to their client profile. Since the main business of Collect-Edition is sports related, I oriented my design to something similar to a professional sports team logo or emblem. My first draft was focused only on hockey (the essence of their business). They asked that I add a fantasy element within the logo to reach the CCG audience, which explain the red dragon behind the store’s name. The addition of the silhouette of a hockey player on the front card adds to their core business.

Collect-Edition is located at 555, rue Notre-Dame, La Prairie, QC J5R 5E5 – 514-236-9596

 Copyright Dany Pepin 2012

My first motion design creation

As part of a school project dedicated to a rebranding of Radio-Canada/CBC, we had to create a moodboard expressing the direction we were taking for the future logo and image of this public institution. Since R-C/CBC is mostly known for its television broadcasting, I decided to compile our team research into a video clip. I taught myself the basics of Adobe After Effects CS5 in a day and took a weekend to create this simple, yet effective motion design clip. The original clip was made in HD, but I had to downgrade the quality for a more appropriate upload time. I will post the result of the rebranding, when the school project is complete.

School project S5 – Beer branding part 1 : The logo

For this branding project we have to develop the visual identity, the packaging and the advertising campaign for a beer. Here is part 1 of the creative process behind this project.

The logo

After several hours of brainstorming an idea came to me. The concept of a craft beer from Quebec was created around the word Yâble (french-canadian slang for “devil”). The devil (Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub), is a symbol rooted in folklore and in the history of Quebec due to the religious authority which our ancestors lived by. The Devil is also the subject of many legends and is often associated with temptation. In the case of this beer, the temptation to drink and the pleasure associated to it.

Instead of a logo, the Yâble will use a word mark (logotype). The letters of the word mark have been reworked to make it more representative of the devil (pointy horns and forked tail). The Y is the most important letter because it will be reused individually later on as the branding strengthen. The overall look also reminds us of the early colonists of Quebec. Scarlet red letters were chosen because it is the traditional colour associated with the devil and because the colour also represent strength and interdiction, two concepts conveyed in this branding.

 copyright Dany Pepin 2011

School project S5 – corporate website

For this project we had to design and code a corporate website for a small to medium enterprise (real or not). We had 20 pages of content to create and each of them needed to be adaptable for smartphones and tablets via media queries CSS stylesheets. The teacher also wanted three flash banners inserted in the website.

I contacted my cousin to know if I could redesign the website of her casting agency for kids and teenagers and she gladly agreed. Now the work began. We had three weeks to create three maquettes, a prototype and the final 20 pages cross-platform website. In my case, I also needed to create a logo because the agency didn’t have one. Surprising since the agency is successful.

Here are the two logos I designed for this project.

Even if this project was focusing on corporate websites, I had to design one that would reflect the casting company I was working for. In this case, a business that is targeting kids, teenagers and parents and shows how fun acting for TV and movies can be at a young age. It needed a younger look. Below are the three maquettes.

The client gave me her preferences and I adapted the second maquette. Most of the hard work was from this point on. The prototype was fairly easy to do but doing different stylesheet for the smartphones and tablets was a bit harder. Hiding flash banners, showing new divs, moving divs and content around without screwing up of the other platform was frustrating at time. Below are the three version of the website. I still have some problem with IE8 and earlier versions which don’t support media queries. I’ll try and fix this problem and other fine details at the end of the semester.

 copyright 2011

School project S4 – Annual Report

For their 100th anniversary, the Caisse Populaire Desjardins Rideau asked the graphic design (GD) and public relations (PR) students to help them get ready for this benchmark year by preparing a marketing campaign (PR) and by creating a logo and an annual report layout (GD). The annual report was to include a section about the history of the financial institution along side the usual numbers, budgets and tables. The student who’s design will be chosen will have the opportunity to do the official 2011 annual report and his historic section will be included in the local french newspaper.

Since this is a financial institution, I decided that most of the report would be very simple and straight forward with the exception of the cover and the historic section which would contain more visual elements. The cover is the “pièce de résistance” where a black and white mosaic of the different buildings and locations of this institutions are included along side the founder Alphonse Desjardins and the peace tower of the canadian parliament. The backdrop gives the effect of charcoal particles flowing in the wind toward the future. Small transparent hexagons flow along with the particle going from black and white to color.

The historic section inside the report mimics the cover and include a timeline that goes from 1912 to 2012. Again, a transition from black and white to color includes monochromatic images of the different buildings through out the years.

Below are some pictures of the annual report. The latter can be seen in its entirety through this flash book. Drag the lower-right corner to flip through the pages.

 copyright 2011

School project S4 – Logotype study

This project focused on the design of a logotype for a movie / band / artist / etc. we liked. After hesitating between a couple of movies, I settled on “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” again (i.e. this project) because of the organic and vapory quality of perfume I could exploit for this logotype. Below is the study from sketch to application. If you haven’t seen the movie, rent it.

 copyright 2011

School project S3 – Team logo

For this project we had to design a football team logo for the school and create a banner. We couldn’t use the existing name and logo of our school sport teams (the Coyote). The objective of this project was to learn how to prepare a file for silk screening and for large size printing.

 copyright 2010

School project S3 – Cité Femmes : Logo

For this project, we needed to design a new identity that would refresh the image of “Cité Femmes” the Women’s Health and Safety Committee of our college. This was the second competition of the semester with money prizes for the top three chosen by the Committee. Click here to see the design study for this logo.

The new identity below represents the different aspects of “Cité Femmes” : security, multiculturalism and women.

The woman aspect is shown on the logo by the silhouette of the woman’s face. This representation is easily identifiable and not implying any particular nationality.

Safety is shown by the simplest form of a house, a triangle atop a square with rounded corners. The house stands for protection, but also the openness and hospitality of this committee. It is implied that the house is the College and its infrastructure.

The various entanglements of colors show multiculturalism. It identifies these intercultural relations within the College. This identity can be used with or without color and with or without the superposition of different pieces that make up the house’s shape. To represent the woman, a sans serif typeface was chosen for the softness and the curves of its letters without losing combativeness of women expressed by the boldness of the font. The placement of the text is a virtual extension of the roof of the house and avoids cluttering the silhouette.

Finally, this modern and trendy identity clearly demonstrates the mission of “Cité Femmes”.

 copyright 2010