What the business does

Creating 360° and VR marketing material

Desired appraisal: Nostalgic, Futuristic, Powerful, Competent

The first step in the process of developing this brand was deciding how I wanted the businesses to be perceived, and filling in the blanks from there. There was this really cool, haunting emotion that I got from both Vanilla Sky and Minority report, and it always stuck with me. It's what I would describe as 'Nostalgic Futurism'. Maybe it's the juxtaposition of those two ideas that stirs up these feelings, or maybe I've just always loved the idea of using technology to create/recreate the human experience (which by the way, is exactly what my business was doing!).

Choosing a name

As always, I originally wrote down about a million names that matched my desired appraisal, then eliminated about 80% based on any additional unwanted associations. Unfortunately I cannot find this list of potential names, that could have been really funny. Anyways, 'There' stuck out because it was perfectly minimalist, which by itself screams futuristic. The word 'There' is insanely powerful- it can be a moment, a place, anything. As it relates to memories, 'There' is an all encompassing word implying literal presence, not just a photograph or a video, but the ability to transplant back into a moment that no longer exists- nostalgia chills!

Developing a logo

The logo also had to be minimalist to keep consistency among my design. However, I couldn't just write the word 'There' without extra artistic flair, it's far too common a word, that only works with novel words. It's true that Apple did it, but only after a couple decades of pairing the name with a technicolor apple. So, like with the name, I made a whole bunch of different concept logos- but unlike the name, my favorite base design logo then turned into 20 slightly different versions, which then led to the final design. The word 'There' with the 'e' representing the 'circular' or 'surround' imagery I would be producing, and the arrows representing the ability to navigate therein. Simple.

As time goes on, you learn that you need to adapt your logo for nearly each different medium. Even if it's the same 'full' logo, the picture needs to be X by Y pixels for whatever banner it's going into. But more importantly, you will need to create a secondary logo, an icon logo. For my business it was easy, I just kept symbolic imagery and did away with the rest. It was the most noticeable element of my full logo so there was zero problem with correct association.

Developing an audio logo

Should you choose to work with video, you will also need an audio logo! This was fun for me as I have complete mastery over a program called LMMS- it's a no frills music making program that I've been playing with forever. Again, I made a bunch! I narrowed it down to the two below and asked others what the sound clips made them think and feel. Audio is different than visual or linguistic content, because when you make it, you cannot hear it as others do- as weird as it sounds, you just don't hear the same thing. The closest analogy to this that I can think of, is when you say a word so many times, it loses meaning to you and just becomes a sound.

This is the runner up audio logo:

This was the chosen audio logo:

Developing a video logo

Although I had specific plans for an animated video logo, for the time being, I decided to stick with a simple, clean fade in, and fast cut out- I was getting busy with other things at this point!

This is the 2D 360° video logo:

This is the 3D 360° video logo: