Shiny Shoe

Polished

Shiny Shoe’s existing logo and website – a golden high-top sneaker and minimalist site designed by a college student – weren’t doing the firm any favors, especially when making presentations to potential corporate clients less familiar with their work. Founded in 2011, the studio had fallen into a pattern of handling a few consulting projects for larger game developers and corporate clients and then using their profits to focus on creating original games, including the popular PuzzleRaiders.

Founder/CEO Mark Cooke recognized he needed a more integrated business model, one that would allow Shiny Shoe to grow, while assigning development time to consulting projects and original work simultaneously.

Capabilities

Identity

Branding

Collateral

Initial concepts

With a name like ‘Shiny Shoe’, you don’t really need to explore different ‘themes’ for a new identity. You can however, explore different ways to present the idea of shoe and getting across this personality of artisan, hand-crafted video games.

Round Two

The client liked several of the initial concepts that they wanted to explore a little further.

First up the monster, which represented the wild imagination they relied on when creating their games. I tightened it up a little further, and explored some different font and color options.

They really liked the idea of it, but wanted me to explore some different types of monsters, so I went back to the sketch stage to quickly come up with some different looks. I narrowed them down to these three so as not to overwhelm.

The client decided that a monster just wasn’t quite right as a representation of their brand, so they asked me to explore a character instead.

They liked the idea of the cat and the gorilla, so I explored different poses and tightened up the gorilla. Ultimately, they felt that the cat was too cute, and the gorilla didn’t have enough sass.

Round three

We could never quite come to an agreement on an appropriate character or monster, so the client decided they wanted me to explore a couple of the other concepts with different fonts and color variations.

Final

The client really liked the hand drawn aspect of the shoelaces concept since it alluded to the fact that their original games were all made ‘by hand’ and spoke to the attention to detail they brought to each of their projects.

The stationery

Once we finalized the logo, I created a suite of templates they client could use for their different brand materials: letterhead, business cards, invoices and presentation. The different types of pieces allowed me to utilize some of the other logo color options I’d explored in earlier rounds.

Credits

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