Logo love

Just a quick post to say how enthralled I am by the new logo/branding concept for the famous Battersea Dogs' Home, now known as just 'Battersea' - that's how familiar it is to us here in the UK, we don't even need to mention the dogs (or cats).

I love it.  It's so simple.

I adore the fact that a loose watercolour splodge in a totally unrealistic colour, with some basic lines, roughly drawn but at just the right angles, can signify something so utterly, perfectly recognisable. As an illustrator I find it easy to get hung up on the vital step between keeping something looking relatively realistic and reducing it to something that's only implied.  It's hard. The simpler something looks, the more difficult it may have been to actually get to successfully.  Often I think the best results are those we draw without inhibition, when we're instinctive and have tapped into another part of our brains, which is tricky when bogged down with all the trappings of convention and expectation and pressure.  Sorry, that's a bit wordy, and probably for much the same reason.  Anyway, yes, what I'm trying to say is that a kind of primal rendering often yields the most striking results.

And in this way, a bluey-purple blob, with a couple of uneven triangular lines and and a flat black oval in the middle is able to represent, so successfully, a particular breed of dog, and an expressive one at that, even though it has no expression....    Our brains and our imaginations will fill in the blanks, but they have to be given just the right directions first.

I reckon the creators of Battersea's new brand have got it absolutely spot on and I can't stop looking at their brilliant blobs.  Have a look here to see the full set of pussycats and pooches, created by illustrator Hiromi Suzuki.