Thursday, 8 January 2015

Two One Six Logo Development

Two One Six is a rap artist who focuses his lyrics on alternative subjects to stereotypical themes such as guns and violence. Instead, he focuses his music towards topics of typography, the alphabet and experimental language use. 

With a keen interest in word play and humorous lyrics, he uses rap to share and perform his interests to others without boasting about money, success or power. After the conclusion of my dissertation suggested that there has to be an element of irony and contradiction in Hip Hop branding, I was aware that in order to successfully re-brand Two One Six, I would also have to make ironic design choices. 

The Two One Six logo is shown below:



The initial logo sketches took a hand-drawn approach similar to the hand drawn style originally used. This was mainly just as initial experimentation to deicide whether the logo should remain hand drawn, or if the new identity would be better suited as digital letterforms.


Although the initial sketches included the rap artist's name written as '216', I decided to remain with the written version 'Two One Six' as it was more relevant to the theme of word play and experimenting with language as opposed to numbers. 



I recreated some of the initial sketches in Illustrator using the paintbrush tool. This allowed me to experiment with different stroke widths for the lettering and experiment with a hand drawn approach. 







Following on from the initial sketched logo variations, I began to think about the different glyphs in the alphabet. I thought this would be an ideal way to incorporate symbolism into my design.


The main glyph which caught my attention was the hashtag symbol. 












No comments:

Post a Comment