Inspired by the bold primary & secondary colours red, yellow, orange, green & cyan, used as the markings on legacy glass & cameras including my first SLR a Canon AE1 Program (which I bought in 1984 & yes I still have), along with the identities of the iconic photography brands Leica, Nikon, Hasselblad, Sony, Kodak & Fuji, we wanted to pay homage to this photographic heritage
Then looking at the identity colours of the current “photo communitIes” landscape as a whole we were surprised how many just use black or inconsistent colours? Plus we’re still confused why Flickr use Cyan & Magenta dots… erm isn’t that litho printing?
Orange was the colour that jumped out to us, as a fitting homage, & even better no-one else was using it
Then came the logo, we wanted something that would represent communities & photography, plus the mark has to be scalable, distinctive, work on it’s own without the LENSHOOD name & without colour, & fit ideally into a square-ish ratio, while not falling into the trap of 99.9% of photography logos, an aperture!
We went through a huge array of different shapes & ideas, most had some sort of interlocking structure akin to classic community logos, so that aperture was creeping in! The Linux Ubuntu logo was obviously in the back of my mind, along with its meaning, so when that was grouped with all the others we had on the wall, along side an image we had of bees in a bee hive, they all melded until HEXI (that’s what we call our logo internally) sort of emerged out my doodles on my iPad
HEXI ticked all of our boxes, an interlocking community design with a strong nod towards photography, scalable, distinctive, square-ish plus fits within a circle perfectly
The last part of the puzzle, the tagline, something that again brought together the essence of what we are trying to achieve, yet also a call to action. Like the LENSHOOD name, it took us quite a few days of pondering & trying things out, yet nothing quite worked… we had about 20 different click taglines alone until where everyone clicks just seemed to fall into place & it was another of those aha moments
Photography click: everyone here takes photos
Community click: everyone here gets along
Call to action click: everyone comes here