Creating a Logo (week 04-05)

Creating a new 7 – eleven logo using gestalt principles

 

The assignment:

1. Look at the following 7-eleven logos and consider their shape, form and simplicity of design. The way they communicate and are recognizable.
   
2. Identify. In your own words explain what you consider 7-Eleven’s individual Gestalt principle to be. Describe the logo and put it into its own category.
3. Pick any 3 gestalt principles and recreate 3 versions of the 7-Eleven logo according to your chosen principle. Be creative and innovative with how you do it. Sketch, plan, do it by hand before digitally creating your favourite in a vector format.
4. You entire process including sketches and research need to be loaded on your blog as part of this learning activity.

 

The 7- Eleven logos have bright colors, its easy to recognize and it has some features that make it a little interesting to watch. Like the N at the end of eleven is written in a lowercase while the rest of the letters is written in uppercase. The two lines in orange and red are to compatible colors that make up the 7. Eleven and the back ground is in green.

The seven being big and in colors that  is in contrast to the smaller text eleven brings it to the foreground. The text eleven is green, like the background that help emphasize that the eleven is after seven making it 7 – eleven, and not eleven- 7. In the logo on the left the seven is followed by eleven, this design makes your eyes continue trough the text. Researching and reading about the 7- eleven logo, I found that some people say that its made in an lowercase letter to better fit in with the curb of the red seven (in the logo on the left). Others say its the wife of the founder who thought the writing looked to hard when all the letters where in caps lock, and therefor had them change it.

 

2. In the logo of seven eleven you find many gestalt principles present. The number 7 is cut in two by the text eleven, and the top line of the 7 is also placed away from the red line going downwards. This it both closure and proximity. Common fate and similarity is also there with the coloring and direction of the red lines. Figure/ground with the green background and eleven in green. This also gives the impression of the text eleven being part of the background, and also a figure in it self.

The main gestalt principle for the 7-eleven logos however, if I view them BOTH together I find is Continuation. How the orange line lead you to the red line that lead you to eleven. In the logo on the right your eyes are drawn from the 7 trough the text eleven. I feel that the orange line and the bend on the red line leads you to eleven and ends at that odd small letter n.

 

3. I chose the three gestalt principles proximity, continuation and figure/ground.

 

Proximity

First one out is proximity. I wanted to change the logo from the mix of text and number to only numbers. Placing the numbers close together I wanted to make one number that contained both numbers.

Sketches

 

 

 

Continuation

By creating lines and pointing parts on the letter E it would guyde the viewers eyes to the letter N which also is the number 11. I didn´t realise that it was the wrong way until I started making it in Illustrator, but it could have been a creative twist to get the logo noticed. However i thougth after creating it that it didn´t have a clear message, the n and the 11 got a little lost.

 

Figure/Ground

My favorite mostly was created in Illustrator. I did not make many of sketching of it before hand. Somehow skecthing figure ground was so difficult. When I was inside illustrator and could change the fill colors it was a lot easier.