Imminent Self Week 3: Concept Development

Concept Development 

In the previous blog post I talked about trans humanism and a potential idea that I wish to develop upon and bring to production. To recap the idea is to fabricate a fake transhumanist mega corporation/company that is promoting, visualising and informing the theory of transhumanism. This will be achieved by creating a false domain alongside corporate identity consisting of business cards, letter heads, a logo (Ideally both motion and static) etc. (who would have thought that I'd be making my own fake mega corporation in my second year of uni! Hella dope.)

Making a Company Name

So to begin with, I wanted to come up with a name and a logo for the corporation starting with a name. I wanted the company to have a futuristic Sci-fi name yet still be taken serious and potentially considered as an actual company that exists. When searching for inspiration of a name, I came across an interesting site called 'Seventh Sanctum - Corporation Generation' which is a is a name generator for those who are having creative block in regards to role playing games and character creations. Using the corporation section as inspiration will help a heap loads with this part of the project. I clicked the generator a couple of times and took a screenshot of the result.

One thing I noticed while cycling through the generator is that names of companies and corporations usually share a similar word or titling such as research, Industries, collective or even corporation. I thought this could be a potential way I could create a professional sounding name and create a corporate identity from it. I created a quick list of example titles and names that could be combined to create a corporate identity.

These names of fictional companies are commonly a pairing of a random name, verb or even an object that would relate to the company, an example of this being 'medi-tech' perhaps could be a name of a medical research and development company.

However when thinking of a name for a company It doesn't have to be a combination of a word or name combined with something like 'limited' or 'Industries' Potentially I could create a company name consisting of single worded branding such as many technology products do today, Dell, Acer, Samsung, Toshiba are examples of this because these are easily recognised through the products that they produce and are associated with.

"Oh Dell? Yeah I have a laptop by them." 

Now coming up with a name isn't a major importance at this stage so it is something I can put on a back burner till a later date. When it comes to creating names it's something that can develop and evolve as I progress and expand with this project. Additionally coming up with names has never really been my forte and I don't want to spend so long on this project trying to think of a name. However this can effect the progress of logo design because a name can help provide inspiration to designs. 

An interesting idea occurred regarding the name and the identity of the company was a sort of collaboration with another student. The other student came up with a similar idea for this project about a concept that somewhat relates to transhumanism and transcending to a digital world. Without going into too much detail this student's concept features a mega corporation also and the colaborative idea was to have the same company name as if it is the same company between two projects. Now the only connection between the two projects would be that the company's name would be the same. With my project being the creation of a fake company identity as if it was real, and their project perhaps featuring the name or a similar logo design as an homage/connection.     

Designing a Logo

When it comes to designing a logo for this project, I initially wanted to do something with hands. Now one of the means of achieving transhumanism is through augmentation. so an experiment I wanted to play around with was to create a design that combines hands and technology. 

To begin with I wanted to experiment with image trace to create some grey scale designs that had a painted vector look to them. Using 2 reference images, one of a concept art for a game and another of a model robotic hand that I own.

Augmented arm concept art for 'Deus Ex Mankind Divided' 

This image was used to create the image traced art piece, it was cut down to the hand and edited slightly before the image trace was applied. However this is official concept art for a game and I will not be using this for anything other than experimentation and referencing. Although the outcome of the design went rather well, it is still using an image of already existing artwork that I do not wish to plagiarise.  

I explored with different accent colours to the hand designs such as the liquid pool below the hand. I also created a design that looked like the hand was dripping oil from it's finger tips and pooling into the border, this design is probably one of my favourites out of all the experimentation because it has a rather elegant appeal. However the slight issue with these designs is that they are too detailed to be a logo, logos tend to be a lot more minimal in comparison to these designs for cost effective reasons. Alternatively i could use these designs as art pieces or different parts of the corporate identity such as business cards or visuals on the fake website I intend on creating. 

In contrast to the designs above, I created some more minimal hand designs that could potentially become logo designs. Using simple hand silhouettes I created a bunch of designs that vary with digital glitch intensity to have a cyberpunk feel to it additionally I added circles and lines to the fingers to give the impression of circuits through the hand. Out of all of the designs I find the top right design (open hand fully glitched) to be my favourite. however I think these designs are too punk-ish and broken/glitchy to be taken as a professional company design.