Exercise: Chance Housing Association

Exercise: Chance Housing Association (Graphic Design One: pg. 119)

The Chance Housing Association has been set up to try and help first time buyers get onto the housing ladder and they want a brand image for their stationery. It is important to them that the Association is seen as being different from the other local housing associations – more modern, more helpful, and definitely welcome to young people wanting to buy a home.

They want to use their logo on their letterhead and office stationery and it will also be used somewhere on the sheets that hold the property details. It also needs to be reproducible in the local newspaper and professional trade magazines.

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I started the process by mind mapping and doing some research. Research into first time buyers brought up a number of characteristics:

• 65% of first time buyers come from the top 40% of earners (2015/16)
• First time buyers tend to be older as a result of the rising costs of housing
• There are a range of schemes on offer to help first time buyers:
  • Shared ownership: Household income of less than £80k
  • Help to buy: starter homes (under 40s), get a minimum discount off market price
  • Rentplus: rent to buy

The brief for Chance Housing Association (CHA) suggests their client range is likely to fall within the Help to Buy age range. Younger buyers who are probably struggling to get on the housing ladder.

The mind mapping threw up two areas that I wanted to think about – the physical structure of buildings and the emotional aspects of buying your first home. A time of excitement but also of anxiety, marking a milestone. This reflects CHA’s brief about wanting to be seen as supportive and helpful.

I also researched the logos and brand identities of other housing associations and organisations involved in social housing, and several characteristics emerged:

• Many use acronyms, usually where they do their name in full is also included
• Some are just text but most include a symbol
• Most are sanserif
• The most common symbols seems to be a house or roof structure
• The predominant colours are blue and green
• Some include three or more colours, particularly if they are concerned with diversity

The colour schemes are interesting; I think the dominance of blues and greens is about projecting an image of safety, security and trustworthiness.

To be different the CHA logo perhaps needed to include:

• Bright and warm toned colours
• Not to include a building structure
• Serif typeface
• Be within a bounding box or frame of some sort

I did a lot of sketching, playing with type layout and exploring different symbols. Some of which conform to the sector characteristics and some that are less conventional. There were a couple beginning to emerge for a shortlist, I particularly liked the idea of some the symbols being the shape of arrows and houses, symbolising moving up as well as pointing to CHA.

I wasn’t sure I quite had what I wanted and went back to the mind map, from which I picked up the notion of architecture and structure. I then did some sketches developing the letters into what could be blueprints or floor plans.

That led me on to thinking about square typefaces and I found several that I thought could work that I downloaded from Dafont.

I then moved on to developing some of the sketches in Illustrator. I was really pleased with the ‘Cubic’ typeface (Logo set 1) but felt that ‘Squared Display’ probably looked too much like a nightclub logo. It was interesting to note at this point how much more comfortable I am now with scrolling through lots of typefaces and seeing them as a source for inspiration as much as images and layouts.

Logo set 2 is based on my own designs using the idea of a floor plan. I was pleased with how they developed and that the idea could be worked up. I think they look quite contemporary and are different to other logos in the sector but in the end I wasn’t sure how legible they would be.

Logo set 3 played on the house/arrow idea using strokes and fill and different colourways. Although they are very clean I am not sure these are distinctive enough and perhaps don’t have quite the right tone.

Logo set 4 were just experiments with different decorative typefaces, again playing on the notion of architecture and buildings.

I decided that Logo set 1 was the approach I would develop into the stationery and publicity materials. I was a bit concerned about the yellow and it was problematic when I photocopied the stationery so I added a grey stroke which seems to work fine. I like the way the ‘h’ of CHA echoes a house and they resemble a honeycomb, the hive as a home. I also think it is distinctive against the other housing association logos I looked at.

 

As I developed the stationery it really highlighted the issues that you need to address, the nature of the information to be included, legibility and readability, setting the tone and so on. I knew using yellow might be an issue so I photocopied the results at different points. This led to adapting the logo (without the box) so that it still works when printed or photocopied in black and white.

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