We’re excited and humbled to announce that Artful Ruckus is the Adobe Hidden Treasures logo design contest winner! It’s an honor to be recognized by a company like Adobe and chosen out of the thousands of amazing entries from skilled designers. The prompt for the contest was to create a Bauhaus-inspired logo design utilizing one of the fonts Adobe and Erik Spiekermann revived from the school’s archives. We chose to use ‘Joschmi’ for our main logotype, a beautiful font based on several letterforms designed by Bauhaus master Joost Schmidt.
Congratulations to @ArtfulRuckus for winning the #AdobeHiddenTreasures logo design challenge! Check out some of the other notable entries here: https://t.co/wRVt39ILWx #contest pic.twitter.com/YsVOb0b8lU
— Adobe Illustrator (@Illustrator) July 12, 2018
We jumped at the opportunity to participate in the contest because of how important the Bauhaus movement has been to our creative careers ever since studying about the school in Art History. The school emphasized logic, simplicity, and function over needless decoration, which has heavily influenced our own design philosophy over the years. So much so, that I actually have a large lithograph print of Wassily Kandinsky’s painting “Small World’s” hanging in my bedroom (Kandinsky was another Bauhaus master and a pioneer in the area of abstract art).
For our submission, we wanted to distill the principles that the Bauhaus established by creating a logo design that was minimal, legible, and functional. To accomplish a minimal design, we let the ‘Joschmi’ font do the heavy lifting, making some modifications to perfect the kerning and rounding some of the squared edges in order to give the logotype a more natural, leaf-like appearance. We then paired it with some secondary type, set in one of our favorite typefaces, Futura Bold (a period appropriate choice). We chose Futura due to it’s simplicity, knowing it would allow the main logotype to shine.
In order to make our Hidden Treasures logo design easily legible, we forewent any needless frills and elected to use a single leaf as the only decoration, pulling the leaf-like shape directly from the letterforms in the logotype. We felt this was the simplest solution for our goal of portraying a feeling of ‘natural health’ without going over the top.
And finally, to make it functional, we tested the logo at various sizes, made sure it read clearly in black and white, and established a brand identity system including a social media icon and a repeating pattern that can be used to strengthen the identity across its various applications.
Whenever we design a logo, we always feel like it’s important to go beyond the digital canvas. It’s difficult to fully understand how a brand identity will behave without applying it to the various places that it would be seen in the real world, which is why we placed the identity on various product packaging. Since Cura is a natural health supplement company, we placed the logo design on supplement bottles, product boxes, and shopping bags. We also plan to continue to apply the identity to various projects as the Adobe Hidden Treasures contest continues (there are several more phases such as a poster design, business card design, etc.).
All in all, this was a really fun project to work on, and a nice break from our daily projects. We definitely recommend throwing your hat into the ring and designing one of the future phases of the Adobe Hidden Treasures contest. Not only is it a great learning experience, but the grand prize is an all-expenses paid trip to explore the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in person! How cool would that be? Click here to learn more about the Adobe Hidden Treasures contest.