Summary
Client
Tilemaster, a long-established retail chain founded in 1981.
Reasons for rebranding
The original logotype struggled with legibility at small sizes, particularly on stationery and merchandise like pens, USB drives, and business cards. The shift to e-commerce and digital platforms created the need for a simplified lettermark suited for mobile interfaces, favicons, and profile icons on social media and messaging apps.
The client also expressed concerns about the ‘t’ in the original design carried some unwanted associations with websites featuring inappropriate content, prompting the need for a custom solution ahead of their new website launch and store renovation.
Solution
To improve legibility at smaller sizes, I made minor modifications and fine optical adjustments, including refining the kerning for letters like ‘ti’, ’em’, and ‘st’ (see 2, 5, 8).
— Higher ascenders and tittles
Readers oftentimes scan the tops of some of the letters to recognise words quickly. Lowercase letters with ascenders and tittles, like ‘t’, ‘i’, and ‘l’, play a crucial role in enhancing readability, which is why they should be drawn taller (1, 3, 9).
— Larger counters and apertures
When designing a boldface, the counters and apertures of the lowercase letters with similar morphology such as ‘e’, double storey ‘a’, and ‘s’ should force more white space to make them appear less spotty on print (11), less dense and easier to read (4, 6, 7, 10).
— Lettermark for minimal spaces
While exploring the brand’s history, I discovered an old mascot that embodied a fun, approachable, and colourful personality. This inspired the creation of the new lettermark — an original lowercase ‘t’ with a playful tiptoe terminal:
Due to the geometric shapes used in the lettermark, it works well independently as well as on circles, squares with round edges, squares and diamond backgrounds.
The new design is appropriate, consistent, and different. It avoids trademark infringement, unwanted associations, and overused themes such as using uppercase Ts, round or squarish shapes, carrier shapes, lines or loops, making it instantly recognisable:
Introduction
Revisiting the tilemaster’s logotype to introduce some very fine modifications so that it’s legible at minimum size. The key project stakeholders have made it very clear that they’d like to see the whole tilemaster logotype even on the smaller spaces such as the navigation bar of the website, despite users knowing that they’re on Tilemaster’s website.
It’s necessary to design a referential symbol to be used separately from its logotype on spaces that are too small for it such as the 16 by 16 pixels fave icon or the profile pictures for social media and messenger apps. Those profile pictures can get very small on popular operating systems and app user interfaces such as in the comment section or read receipts, grouped app icons, app notifications, email signatures, business cards, some merchandise and anything small.
Feel free to watch the video presentation below or read about my thought process and methods:
Typeface
Let’s start with the typeface: ITC Kabel Bold, known for its distinct rhombus-shaped tittles on the lowercase ‘i’ and ‘j’, making it highly recognizable:
Although often overlooked by designers, I find its eccentric personality and quirky traits well-suited for Tilemaster. While it’s not common among major brand names, Kabel Bold has a strong presence in pop culture, frequently appearing on movie posters, album covers, and other forms of artwork.
It’s the typeface of choice for Six Flags, Piggly Wiggly, Monopoly, Futurama, and lots of other board and console games such as Blarf, Sonic Boom, Super Smash Bros, and Sorry! It has earned a heavy presence in pop culture due to its entertaining and gamy vibe.
Unconventional baseline
There’re a few things they did, whoever designed the logo, that I approve of. For instance, they removed the unconventional baseline which I very much dislike but that’s just a matter of personal taste which is very subjective, obviously:
But the fashion in which they did it is a little concerning:
They seem to have ignored one of the basic principles of typeface design which is optical illusion. The round letterforms are meant to overshoot the baseline and x-height to appear to be of similar size which is why the letter e looks like it’s floating over the baseline especially the one on the right side:
Ascenders and tittles
Our primary goal is to ensure legibility at small point size. When we read we scan the top part of some letters to quickly identify words. Lowercase letters ‘t’, ‘i’, and ‘l’ and others with ascenders and tittles are crucial in enabling us to read faster which why they should be higher up and more visible:
Kerning
The same principle applies to kerning — letters are spaced from the top since the lower portions are less legible.
You can still see that it says Kerning by just looking at the top part of the word. But the weighted diagonal stroke of the cap ‘K’ resembles that of an ‘R’, the curved stroke of the ‘e’ is similar to that of ‘c’, and you won’t make out what the rest of the vertical stems are to save your life. This is how kerning is done:
And this is how unprofessional keming is done:
And they just couldn’t kern less:
Let’s move the t a little closer, add some breathing space between e and m, and bring the rest of the letters together:
Here’s an improved version and here’s the original:
Kerned vs original
Boldface
A much bigger concern is the unacceptable fashion in which they changed the weight of certain glyphs by simply adding a colour stroke around it. No matter how much time I spent contemplating it I couldn’t understand what they were doing in here:
When designing a boldface, it’s important to focus on areas like the counters and apertures of the lowercase letters with similar morphology such as ‘e’, double storey ‘a’, and the spine of an ‘s’. Else they’ll simply vanish at minimum size. Even now, they’re almost non-existent at small scale.
Let’s increase the eye of the e while maintaining vertical stress and widen its aperture, and do the same for letters a and s. The vertical parts of the curved strokes usually seem bolder to compensate for the lack of shoulders:
Final touches
As a final touch, I enhanced legibility and consistency with the signage by filling in the diamond. The thin diamond outlining stroke would simply disappear at small scale or fill up when printing anyway. Let’s also make it less spotty by scaling it closer to the original tittle proportions.
The lowercase l (L) is usually slightly thinner than the capital I (i) and higher than the cap height but not to the extent it was originally designed. Decreasing the height of the l will also increase the proportional x-height making it more legible at minimum size.
Here’s the retouched version of the logo followed by the original. As you can see, the difference is striking:
The symbol
If we take the minimum most conservative action and make the lowercase letter T a symbol, it may appear similar to the Tumblr icon for some people, despite it having different colours and glyph designs and being created decades prior:
In order to create something truly unique and avoid situations like that, we should consider international practices.
International practices
There are numerous symbols featuring the letter ‘T’, such as Canada Trust with a capital ‘T’ inside the C’s counter, the old and new symbols for a school board in Quebec, and Titan packaging. While some have been rebranded, my focus is on the original concepts. Some very creative symbols from Bulgaria featuring a pencil in the negative space, a logo for a British pianist, one with a dictionary resting on the arms of the capital T from Poland, T-Mobile AKA Dutch Telekom, a lot of Japanese and Taiwanese logos, TATA, TD bank, a lot of telecommunications companies such as Telus, the iconic Temple university’s T, several Kazakhstani and Russian brands, Tesco’s, Tesla, Tether cryptocurrency, Texaco, Texas Instruments, Texas Tech’s double T, the New York Times and its legendary T, Thesaurus, Tibbets paints with a very appropriate symbol, Tiger Woods, the iOS8 Tips app icon, Tipton lakes designed by the late Paul Rand, Tissot rebranded in 1998, lots of Tokyo brands, Toolway that was rebranded around 2018, the former Total icon. Totem logo by Adrian Frutiger who designed Univers, the first proper typeface family that we used for Holten Impex, and Avenir, one of my personal favourites. The iconic Traveller’s umbrella, Truelinks, Trustmark, Tucker, Tumblr, and many more. A total of 230 t-symbols.
And what happens if you don’t study these you may ask? Well, you’re setting yourself up for failure and will most likely be sued for copyright infringement:
There’s only so much you could come up with, which is why it’s crucial to consider these before stealing someone else’s work whether intentionally or not. These are basically horizontally or vertically reflected but otherwise virtually identical monograms.
The 1972 symbol for the Timmins brokerage company by a Montreal based graphic designer looks awfully similar to the 1965 Triverse identity. Now to be fair, the Canadian artist had way more works in the similar genre than his American counterpart so it’s hard to tell. Besides it’s not like the Internet was a thing back in the day so we owe them the benefit of the doubt but we cannot afford to be this careless and not consider the international practices in this day and age.
Now, while the above identities look alike, the following do not:
Despite also featuring three capital Ts, it’s a very different and equally interesting execution of an idea grouped within the same category. Unfortunately for us, they would still look somewhat related to an untrained eye. And it’s not just them, a lot of logos do:
I apologise for the quality of some of these, they’re just scan copies from half a dozen of my logo-books and Global 2000 firms that I found a lot of similarities between. We don’t want to do that.
Overused themes
We aim to avoid evoking associations with other brands, as these connections would be beyond our control. And so we would like to avoid exploring overused themes and come up with something truly original and fresh that is appropriate to the Tilemaster brand. Now what are these overused logo categories?
Uppercase theme
We can see that the vast majority of these are comprised of the capital T:
Lowercase theme
And the minority like Telus and Tumblr feature the LOWERCASE T, and, as you can see, Tumblr is the only famous lowercase ’t’ logo and we wouldn’t like our customers to associate us with that social media platform in particular:
Round shapes theme
A lot of them contain some sort of a pronounced round shapes or have round edges like Tata and Toyota Motors:
Quadrilateral shapes theme
And many of them are made of squares, rectangles, trapeziums and other quadrilateral shapes whether flat or in 3D such are the likes of Tissot or Toolway:
Other polygon shapes theme
Just by looking at these I can see what shapes will and will not make Tilemaster stand out. Some of them are hexagons, triangles and other polygons like the old logo for a School Administration in Montreal or The Trustmark building in Alabama:
Lines theme
Lines and outlines, whether thin or bold, flat or in perspective are present in some shape or form in many symbols like the new logo for a School Administrator in Montreal or the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority by Geismar. His studio is behind some of the world’s most iconic symbols like the NBC’s peacock, Showtime, Chase Bank, National Geographic, Beko, Mobil, Avery, PBS, New York University AND the Tecmilenio University to name a few.
Loops theme
Some symbols like TD and other banks in Japan and Taiwan, also Telus, and both the former and newer Total symbols have loops:
Negative space theme
Canada Trust, Pencil Tehnikum, Texaco and others feature some letter or a shape in the negative space, Trello’s lists also occupy the white space under the arms of the capital ’T’ and above the lowercase ‘r’:
Carrier shapes theme
Carrier shapes such as circles, ovals and quadrilaterals host many of the symbols such as the Tether cryptocurrency, Truelinks Wear and the Tucker’s new logo:
3D shapes theme
And some are three-dimensional such as the Titan packaging by a US artist who designed the logos for The American Museum of Natural History, Exchange Place Centre, and many other architectural projects. Thesaurus, Toolway, Top Frontier, Total and others also feature 3D objects or elements in perspective:
Human shapes
Few of them such as Ronnie Teape feature a human silhouette or resemble humans in some way:
Design constraints
Let’s study the constrains of the typeface design to know what we can and cannot do. If we take the Tilemaster’s T and see which of its parts are essential and which can be omitted without rendering the glyph unrecognisable. We can see that the lowercase t is still there even without its terminal, and even if we alter the cross stroke. None of those features are essential and many designers leave them out to allow for more tightly spaced display and titling typefaces. And of course there’s the capital T:
Brand mascot
I believe that the tilemaster mascot is the most important branding element. Lots of brands have mascots. Some, like McDonalds, have discontinued theirs but vast majority have held onto it throughout multiple rebranding campaigns. And for good reasons too, they convey more meaning and emotion than any other symbol ever would. If I were to summarise this colourful character with one word, it would be playful or approachable:
It’s not too corporate or too serious and that’s exactly what we want for our symbol, a playful lowercase t with a tiptoe terminal, centred like the bottom vertex of the square tittle. An icon that’s comprised of both circular and quadrilateral shapes would work well with various shapes:
It is based on the Tilemaster T, Tilley, and the tittle and arguably has more personality than many of the other human-shaped t’s:
