Friction Factory Logo 1st Concept

This is the first draft of one of the ideas on my earlier ink sketches, which has gone off to the client for some feedback. So far so good, so think we have a solid start.

The Friction Factory is a new indoor climbing company here in the UK, soon to be opening it's doors in some strategic locations in the UK, including Brighton, Devon and London.

Black on white version

The brief was to create a clean and bold mark, that some how avoided the seemingly cliche logos used elsewhere. So the challenge has been to pick up on some of the key aspects of indoor climbing and incorporate them into a logo.

I felt the ideas in the previous sketch were a good start so have spent time tweaking these, finally ending up with this idea.

The key aspect shows the top half of a climbers body from the back in a outstretched pose, the left arm out stretched.

The mark also was initial created from a fist shape, the bottom right part being the thumb and the left being the other fingers, the round dot being the head, but the dot also acts as a cutaway profile of a rope, like the hand/carabinner is feeding the rope through.

Significantly, the red dot gives a nod to the red-point style of climbing in the harder grades.

With this mark, I realised that if you flip and invert it, you get the full body in a nice neat reflected style pose. Although in this version it's not so clear, there is scope to tweak it so that if you slice it top left to bottom right as a diagonal, you get two F's. Shown roughly by the sketch in red, in the previous Dribbble. (needs some work to define that I know.)

What I like is that there is potential here to incorporate more subtle meanings, the fist representative of a vice like grip of a wrench a associating it with strength, holding, firm etc. But not the main focus.

After playing with the artwork I found that we could insert the logomark into the 'middle' of the logo, where the 'o' would be, so the negative space in the 'fist', with a bit more fine tuning, would look more like a reversed 'o' than it does now.

This incorporation of the logo into the wordmark helps give the logo more character and meaning, now it looks like the climber is obviously hauling and climbing up over the 'O', so even without a tag line, this incorporation helps define further what The Friction Factory is about.

Not settled on fonts yet as it's very early days, so have placed a relatively neutral sans-serif for the moment.

More by Smithographic – Logo Designer & Digital Design Studio.

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