This is a portfolio project exploring a new design for the logo of the German human aid organization THW, short for "Technisches Hilfswerk". My goal was to declutter their current design. It lacked scaleability and was really hard to read from a distance, making it harder for people to recognize and thus harder for people to remember and connect to the organization.
Those are some of the first sketches of my initial idea for the logo. I was going for the monogram idea right from the start but after coming up with this concept, I quickly realized that it is too noisy and wasn't going to work in smaller scales very well, so I had to take the idea further.
In my next sketching phase I finally found the concept I was super excited about. In the first round I was too focused on combining all three letters with each other, instead of combining the T and the W in a way that allows the H to be hidden in the negative space.
Once I had the concept down, I refined the stems and strokes to be of the same thickness as well as getting rid of the sharp edges of on the T and W. The final design was visually balanced and decluttered with a sharp increase in readability.
The current logo of the "Technisches Hilfswerk" had a few areas that I aimed to improve. First of all, the initials "THW" have a distorted look to them. The stem of the T looks too small while the stems of the H got a strange length that give the initials a goofy look. I found this quite unfitting for such an important organization to have a logo that does't reflect their professionalism. The typeface of their present logo works good, but it seems a little outdated and I wanted to use a typeface that fits well with my proposed redesign.
The biggest problem I saw within the current design of the THW Logo was the lack of visual balance which directly translated into a design that is not scalable and easy to recognize, making it harder for people to remember, and thus decreasing brand awareness for the organization. I tackled this problem with my design by creating a monogram of the initials, instead of stacking them on top of each other. By hiding the H in the negative space that the T and W create I was able to neatly place the initials into the gear wheel to give the design more room to breathe. The logo is much easier to read and will work well in both, digital and print media and in any scale. For places where the gear wheel would take away too much space, the monogram can also be used by itself.
For the colors, I used the colors of the original design. The reason for this is two-fold. The first one is the fact, that the color-combination of the rich navy blue with the white is already deeply connected to the organization and changing it up might do the brand identity around it more harm than good, as people might not be able to recognize the brand as quickly as they do now. The second reason being my goal with this redesign to really focus on the core aspects of the brand and change them in a way that allows people to still ne able to quickly recognize it without taking too much away from its original tone. I wanted to make sure that if the organization would use this design, it would still speak the same language as the original. Changing the colors would've driven me away from this objective.
The Factoria font with its bold and strong letters seemed like the perfect addition to my created logo design. The letters have the same consistent stroke weight as the letters in the monogram do. I switched the logotype from lowercase to uppercase as this creates horizontal lines through the type that gives it the appearance of securely resting on top of each other, playing on the aspect of stability, reliability and strength - key adjectives that describe the importance of the organizations work.
