We had such a fun time working with Moylan Iceplex at Tranquility Park on their rebrand and new website!
Here’s their old logo.
For their new logo and branding, the goal was to create a style that would be Family-Friendly.
- During our research, most of the family-friendly brands we came across were either boring or too childish.
- It makes sense to have it lean on being childish, because if you go to a place as a family… it’s usually focused on the kids.
- But the problem is, what happens when the kids get a little older?
- The style needs to cross boundaries, so when high school and college aged kids come, they don’t feel dorky.
So, our goal with this is to be Family-Friendly – appeal to young kids, but also appeal to an older crowd.
HERE’S A BIT OF OUR PROCESS:
At first, we did an illustrated logo with elements from different activities on ice. But they needed a general one. And they were also painting it on the side of the building – and with a hand drawn logo painted on the side of the building, it could look like the sign painting was sloppy.
So we went back to the drawing board. We started sketching figure eights and lines that were made in the ice from skates. And eventually came up with a loopy M.
I really liked the idea of incorporating ice marks into the logo to form an M. However, I soon realized this looked similar to our friend Micah Max‘s logo (above on the left). So I quickly contacted Micah, and showed him the logo and asked him if this was too similar. It had a different concept behind it, but I couldn’t deny that it had some similarities. (We’ve seen too many of our independent designer friends get ripped off by some agencies and some designers, as well as experiencing it ourselves. Even though this was a different look and idea – the last thing I wanted to do is make an amazing designer feel ripped off even in the slightest).
Here’s how he responded…
“Totally great! No worries. To tell you the truth, after I made my logo, I found like 3 or 4 other places that have similar marks. It’s just how it happens sometime :) – Micah Max
So, we had a logo – now we just needed to depend on the environment around it to create the youthful feel.
We started to illustrate things that made us think of ice to create a repeating background that will appear on the majority of Moylan’s materials, surrounding the logo.
MoylanIceplex.com
The website was built to easily share Moylan’s schedules, events, clubs, news and basic info. The hardest part was organizing it all so it’s easy to find the things you’re looking for – but that’s always the case. I think some of the best websites feel simple, even though there’s a lot going on.
We had a great time working with everyone at Moylan. They even told us we could drive the zamboni!