Logo and Branding: Daum & Co
Posted: February 27, 2012 Filed under: Business, Banking & Finance, Logos & Branding | Tags: Art, branding, business, Business Card, consultancy, design, emboss, graphic, hunt, identity, logo, logo-type, management, monogram, news, opinion, review, richard baird, roundel, stationary, Studio, typography 1 Comment »
Daum & Co, formerly Daum Partners is a Melbourne based business advisory and management consultancy founded by Tony Karantonis. Their new identity, created by boutique design agency Hunt Studio, combines the brand’s smart, strategic thinking and productivity with a simple monogram device and its sense of character, creativity and individuality of the service through a series of contrasting illustrations.
“Top tier management consultant Daum Partners engaged Hunt Studio to redevelop its branding and identity to facilitate a name change from Daum Partners to DAUM&CO and reflect its high level of professionalism. The deliverables included a custom logotype, alternate logo marque, typeface selection and colour palette development. The identity applications consist of a complete stationery suite, website and promotional material. As part of the overall solution, a series of brand illustrations was also developed to represent each of the capabilities provided by DAUM&CO. The illustrations appear on the website and in promotional material, and have been developed to convey the personality and the unique way of thinking conducted by the firm.”
- Taken from the hunt Studio website.
The utilisation of a monogrammatic logo-mark delivers a classic sense of personalised service that, through its geometric letter-forms, constructed from a consistent line weight and square terminals, a stacked layout and circular container manages to creatively resolve a structured and reliable approach with the company’s global experience. These ideas are reinforced across a logo-type with a wide monospaced execution that, while slightly more corporate adds a more straightforward sense of professionalism. A fairly conventional corporate grey and white colour palette has been given a nice contemporary application across an uncoated substrate along side a subtle embossing of the mark as well as a number of coloured highlights within some of the illustrations. Although these images rely quite heavy on gradients, which appears perhaps a little off-the-shelf, they deliver a nice contrast against the formality of the logo-mark and type whilst representing the brand’s key capabilities and conveying a bit more personality.
It is hard to get to the heart of what the Daum & Co brand is about because of the volume of business buzzwords on their website but the identity works well to cut through the majority of this and visualise a strategic and individualised approach. Each component contributes to the resolution of a broad set of brand propositions and avoids any superfluous details in its minimalistic execution. Ultimately it feels quite genuine for what can often be a difficult and generically represented industry.
Visit the BP&O Logo Gallery for a chronological guide to all the identities reviewed on BP&O.
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Richard BairdRichard is a British freelance designer and writer who specialises in the development of logos, branding and packaging. He has written for Brand New and Design Week, is an editor for The Dieline, has featured in Computer Arts magazine and also runs the resource Design Survival. |
You know, there’s only so many original ideas, everything else is in someway other other connected to something that’s gone before. Cars are a great touchstone for design. We can really see the progression of an artform in a simple, obvious and compressed time frame. A time frame that’s almost human, unlike if we looked at art, it’s been going too long, it’s hard to join all those dots. But cars, cars have been around for 100 years or so and they are our ever present statues of Venus. We worship them, we lust ofter them and, if it’s done badly enough, we can ignore them (Renault Laguna anyone?). As such, we can see the concepts and ideas running through this art, from one progenitor to the next. We can easily see when an idea arrived and who used it next.
It’s like that sometimes with visual/graphic design, if it’s obvious enough. I kind of think that when I look at this mark. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is beautifully done. It’s nicely put together, fine and delicate and, like a Corbusier chair or something similar, it makes me feel good to look at it. The problem is though, like with a Corbusier chair, it’s either a Corbusier chair or it isn’t. If it’s the real deal it’s special but when you find out it’s a knock off, no matter how well done it’s still takes the shine off a little. Like when you logo makes you have flashbacks of finely crafted, über-designed Danish multi-media equipment only to find out it’s for a business consultancy. See what I mean about there’s only some many original ideas? Thing is, it’s to be expected. Some things will always look like something else. The trick is not to make your thing like something more famous (unless you work in Aldi’s packaging design Dept (love it, I really do! Cheeky buggers – now there’s a blog posting I would LOVE to read).
Then finally, there’s the illustrations on the posters. I love the brand. I loathe the posters. The logo is sharp the posters are not. They look like clip art (nice quality but still clip art) and when placed with a Buahausian style logo things need to look equally well crafted. You can’t do designing to the sound of Strauss then decide what we need is a fat slab of Heart FM in the mix. I really think that as with the logo has set out to do, the less is more mantra would work equally well with the posters. Finer, tighter, more class – less trash. A moody, half lit prop shot would be much nicer, if budget it tight, a nice simple line illustration.
My two cents have now run out….. click, click click. thunk.