HARROW LOGO
Harrow Council is the local authority for the London borough of Harrow in Greater London. The council sets council tax and also collects precepts for Greater London function and business rates.
The council is one of the biggest employers in the area with a clear objective of putting residents first in delivering the essential services. As the council look to the future, the council has a new set of priorities and with it’s on-going modernisation programme, it is seeking ways to deliver these priorities. As a result, they wanted to evolve and refresh their council logo to reflect their geographical and historical significance. Therefore the logo should signal how the organisation is modernising it’s service delivery to create a clear sense of civic pride.
PROBLEM
Their current logo has been in existence for more than 15 years. The lozenge design is now looking dated and its relevance is now questionable. Over the recent years, a secondary logo has been used has evolved across our digital presence and assets, so it is felt to be giving mix messages to the public. Therefore, they needed to consolidate this all into one new logo which could be used across all internal and external platforms, physical and digital formats to signal that they are "one" counci, serving the residents of Harrow.
SOLUTION
By creating a modern, stylised and authentic logo for the borough, they will not only be able to be able to generate a cohesive brand voice but more importantly help distinguish their borough amongst others.
DESIGN PROCESS
RESEARCH
First I decided to do thorough research on the historical and geographical significance of the borough to see how certain symbolic elements could be used in the logo to help visually communicate Harrow's rich history to its residents.
A key part specified in the brief was that they wanted to introduce the organisations "Civic Coat of Arms" as this is an important symbol of of the council's unique historical significance. After analysing the key elements of this emblem I decided to experiment with ways in which I could translate this original symbol into a more modern illustration that would reflect a contemporary and stylised image.
VISUAL DEVELOPMENT
I wanted to construct the shield as I thought this would be a key frame structure for the logo. In addition to this, the shield would act as a vehicle for embedding the several significant symbols onto.
The final constructed shield included several elements from the original crest:
Green bar - represents the green belt around London in which much of the borough lies.
The flaming torch of knowledge - Harrow School.
The quill pen - represents Pinner, where several famous authors have lived.
The red pile - stands for The Gore and for the Chandos family.
The clarion or organ stop - George Frederick Handel who lived and worked in the area.
The trees - depict Harrow Weald
Choosing a suitable typeface
When looking at suitable typefaces I decided to look at both sans-serif and serif to see what effect each one would generate. It was clear that the serif font generated a more old archaic feeling to the logo compared to the serif font. Therefore the serif font was used as a result as the varied strokes worked cohesively with the intricate crest design.
Testing out different orientations
Upon reflection, It was decided that the overall look of the crest was too intricate and needed to be simplified appropriately so that the logo can be outputted to the different interfaces (both physical and digital) accordingly.
Simplyfying the crest
As a result, I decided to simplify the crest design by reducing the amount of tones in the illustration and makes the elements more flat so that it would be suitable for digital interfaces.
Final logo design
The final change I made focussed on simplifying the crest appropriately so that each of the key symbols could be visually seen and distinguished. In addition to this, I change the typeface from Oriya MN to Azo Sans which helped generate a more crisp feel to the logo.
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