GUARDIAN HOME INSPECTION LOGO DEVELOPMENT
Hey y'all! It's been a while since my last post so I thought I'd share some updates with you. I'm currently on the hunt for a full-time graphic design position, it's tough but I have a feeling something will come through soon! In the meantime, I've been keeping myself busy and slightly above broke by doing lots of different freelance projects/jobs here and there! One of my most recent freelance endeavors is a branding project (i looovvvve creating logos) for my brother. He recently got his home inspection license and would like to start his own home inspection business. He came to me to help him create an identity for his business. Originally he thought of some names for the company like ProSpec or Prime home inspections but those names are a little generic and I thought it might be cool to utilize our unique last name, Guardalabene, which is Italian for "Guard the good" or "Guardian of the good". I threw out the suggestion of Guardian Home Inspections and we both liked the ring to it! Plus anyone who has knowledge of romantic languages like Spanish or Italian might identify the last name connection and find it kind of cool and memorable. So Guardian Home Inspections it is! Strong, simple and rooted in our name.
When it came to developing the logo I did a lot of research on what is currently out there.. Just by doing a broad Google search for "Home Inspection logos" I found that there's a lot of stale logos with typical "abstracted" roofs placed ontop of some text or logos with a big clunky magnifying glass slapped onto it. Of course I also found a lot of logos with the classic inexplicable "swish" shape in it. Is the swish meant to make the logo look "cool" or "high tech"? I think in most cases all the swish shape does to a logo is make it look extremely generic. A swish is so nonspecific and vague that you could slap it onto just about anything and call it a day... which is why I HATE swishes! Sorry, I kind of went off on a rant there. Finally I found a surprising number of logos that.. well are identical! The poor entrepreneurs probably went to one of those "design it yourself" websites and picked one out of maybe 10 different house shapes then jammed there name into it.. unfortunately by doing this they created a logo that is void of any uniqueness, originality, creativity and memorableness. I strongly believe that "design it yourself" websites severely devalue the worth of graphic design and devalue those who have worked and studied their craft for years to obtain a degree in visual communication design. Again, I'm ranting sorry!
So this has turned in to a pretty long post but let me wrap it up by talking about what I created to solve this design problem. After researching what home inspection logos were already out there, I decided that I wanted to create anything BUT what others have done. I wanted to reach a little further than the obvious and extremely over-done solutions but at the same time I needed to stay within the recognizable boundaries of visual cues that denote "Home Inspection". Developing a logo is a delicate procedure where you don't want to completely reinvent the wheel so that the viewers of your mark will have no clue what the logo is for but at the same time you want to create something that hasn't been done before, something unique that will stand out in a competitive market.
I wanted to take two different visual routes with this project. One route was to create a logo that resembled some kind of "approval" stamp since after a home inspection the house will either have a safety seal of approval or.. not. I thought an approval stamp would be a positive association with a home inspection business and it's a visual reference that has enough familiarity with out being too expected. The other route I took was to create a logo that was type-dominant. Something that didn't need too many flourishes and extraneous imagery. I picked type that felt was very strong and industrial and that could stand alone or with a very simple glyph. I did want to create at least a couple logos that fit the industry "standard" of what you expect in a home inspection logo so I created a simple eye glyph with a magnifying glass tucked into it as a nice surprise and a stripped down silhouette of a house pushed into the background of another logo. I'm pretty happy with this first set I developed. Overall I think they're not too wildly different but at the same time they're modern and unique enough to stand out amongst the MANY examples of logo generic-ness.
For anyone who made it to the end... CONGRATULATIONS. Hopefully that wasn't too boring and hopefully I didn't come off as some "know it all design snob". I'm not!! I most definitely have a lot to learn in this field and am aware that not everyone went to design school or even cares about design (although they should because it effects everything!) Although this blog's main goal is to showcase my work it's secondary goal is to educate people a little on my design process and on the principles of design in general. Thanks for reading and I'll be posting more on this project's progress in the near future :)
