The Art of Logo Design
Logos are part of your brand identity. They do not necessarily need to explain what your business does, they need to identify your brand. That said, there's no reason your logo can't pack a bunch of thought and meaning into it. These can be things that the average customer would never know from looking at it.
When I redesigned the logo for Athletic Lab, I didn't tell Mike Young about it. This flies in the face of the logo design process, obviously, but I was actually just practicing... it was never intended to be real. Luckily I worked at Athletic Lab and already had a lot of insights to go off of.
There were some things I wanted to accomplish, one of which was especially important if I was ever going to show it to Mike. I wanted to make sure that the new logo paid tribute to Athletic Lab's past.
The "beaker" as it's usually called (even though it's technically a flask), is all about Athletic Lab's story. Forever, Mike had used a clipart illustration of a flask as the avatar on the Athletic Lab Twitter account, so I wanted to bring that in. At the time, Athletic Lab had been doing business out of their 2nd facility since opening, so that is why I chose two measurement lines on the flask. I put bubbles outside of the flask to represent the company's many accomplishments, but I made sure to leave one bubble still inside to represent that Athletic Lab has more to come...that they are always striving for something bigger and better.
As for the wordmark, one thing I didn't love about the original AL logo was the font used. It was different enough from your more common classic typefaces like Helvetica, Futura, DIN, etc but not unique enough to avoid seeing the same font used for another brand. The letter A was too recognizable. In fact, there was another business in the area using the same letter A. The only way I knew would avoid that problem in the future was to create the typeface from scratch and make it 100% unique to Athletic Lab. So that's what I did.
I felt it was cool enough to show Mike what I did, and to my surprise he loved it and within a day we were planning how to replace the old logo with the new one.
