The very first edition of BarCamp Goa is happening on 30-Oct-2011, Sunday at BITS Pilani Goa Campus. When my friend Niju Mohan contacted me for a logo, I jumped and took the opportunity.
Why? Because I love to do a design under a lot of constraints. I believe that this will help me to explore and find innovative solutions. If I am correct, this is my fifth logo for a BarCamp (BarCamp Bangalore 7, Bangalore 8, Bangalore 9 and Kerala 9, Bangalore 10). I have tried to give an individuality to each of them. I suddenly found myself in an ideating mood.
Beach, Umbrella, Jellyfish, Seahorse…
This image shows the direction of my initial thoughts. Then I remembered the excellent observation by Joshua Johnson.
Rather than just making something attractive, designers look at the design process with a pinch of added intelligence and a perspective that skewed enough to see things differently than the rest of the world.
These types of logos make you smile at the brilliance of both the idea and the execution and have several layers of meaning that can hit you in waves.
A Foaming Beer Mug
The first time I visited Goa was on a ‘study tour’ from my graduate college. I remembered my friends observing that ‘Beer is cheaper than water in Goa!’ This made me to visualize a tall and foaming beer mug that you used to see in movies like Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.
I had to add a yellow side and bottom lines to enclose the words tightly. The foaming bear is made from a half of the standard Barcamp logo.
Yes, I know. You indeed need ‘a lot of imagination’ to visualize this logo as a foaming beer mug!
One more option I tried was the one with a thought bubble in the place of the present foam. Later I abandoned it.
Incidentally, just see the typographic treatment given to the 2010 Tamil film Goa directed by Venkat Prabhu.
Fonts in the Mug
I wanted the alphabet ‘p’ of ‘BarCamp’ to be the handle of the mug. This made me to split the words as |bar|camp|goa| and arranged them one over the other to form the tall mug.
|bar| and |goa| are in Niagara Solid as it is a tall font. ‘The first edition, 30 October 2011’ is written in the font Journal. Now it took some time for me to decide on the ‘mug handle.’
Earlier I considered both Quadranta and Century Gothic. After the feedback from Niju and others, I settled for Yanone Kaffeesatz as the ‘p’ in this font resembles the shape of the actual beer mug handle pretty neatly.
Posters and Badges
Following are the two teaser posters designed for BCG1. Click on the image for a larger view.
Title: Chair on empty beach
Photographer: Fred Fokkelman, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Title: Colourful umbrella
Photographer: Gareth Weeks, UK
Two badges are also derived from the above posters so that people can display them in their websites.
So, what do you think? Drop your comments below.
Design date: 22-Sep-2011
Brilliant Anas. Thanks a lot..