In 2022, MUSIC Matters Leadership felt it was time for a change. We wanted the logo and branding to have a more clear structure, with a defined color palette, timeless design, and a clean logo that conveyed the energy of the organization. Myself, along with three other members of the Leadership team, spearheaded this initiative to revamp MUSIC Matters branding.
First Steps
To start, we first evaluated the current logo, what we liked about it, what we didn’t, and where we wanted to go from there.
What we liked:
1. Easy to look at. Our logo was refined, simple, and easy to read.
What we didn’t like:
1. The colors. We felt by using the blue and yellow motif, our branding was very closely associated with the University of Michigan. We felt that as we are already a club at the University, it wasn’t necessary to uphold the blue and yellow colors in our logo.
2. The motifs. As you can see, our old logo included an educational looking font, a pencil, and the square around the words is reminiscent of wired headphones. We felt that as a club, our mission of bringing the community together through the power of music was not properly being conveyed. The “music” part of MUSIC Matters seemed like an afterthought in this design.
Before we got started, we also surveyed our club, asking them what adjectives came to mind when they thought “MUSIC Matters.” Here’s what they said.
What Next?
After we decided what main changes we wanted to make, we started pulling inspiration and creating color schemes.
Ultimately, we decided this color scheme would have the greatest impact on branding for MUSIC Matters.
Our Design
With all of this in mind, we started working on our designs specifically. First, the logo.
These were our initial 5 designs for our new logo. We were extremely drawn to music motifs in our branding overall – especially for our logo. We wanted to make it a bit more obvious that our mission centered around music. We thought about guitars, disco balls, CD’s, cassettes, and headphones, but ultimately decided we wanted some sort of Vinyl Record idea to be incorporated.
We loved option three for the main logo, but didn’t love the short-hand option and had a hard time walking away from option 1’s round short-hand record logo.
TL,DR: We combined them.
Putting It Together
After deciding on these main factors, we were so excited to put our new marketing into place, representing MUSIC Matters in a much more authentic and comprehensive way.
To learn more about MUSIC Matters…