Symetris Pilates is a Pilates studio in Zurich. It was formerly known as Balanced Bodies, but changed name. This meant the entire corporate identity had to be redesigned.
Since the studio was bigger than Balanced Bodies and the plans for the business somewhat grander, I felt compelled to go back to the drawing board and do a total redesign of the corporate identity. Since the original work with Balanced Bodies I felt that I had gained some experience and was now a little embarrassed about some of that earlier work. The Symetris concept would have to be more polished.
Before starting we had to define the overall principles that would guide the design process. Much the same design goals applied for Symetris as it did for Balanced Bodies, so I'll restate them again:
Pilates is a form of exercise where precision and control are of paramount importance. Any graphics should be clean and crisp and should convey a message of simplicity and purity. Fonts should be uncomplicated, widely spaced and blend in with the graphics to the point where they are integrated into the design, but not dominant. Light, soft colours would be favoured over dark colours, and contrast and fading colours would be used where possible rather than complicated colour schemes.
As with any logo design it should be simple, and adaptable to a range of different sizes, aspect ratios and colour situations (such as black and white, grey scale, spot colours, and full colour. It should be able to be effective across a range of different resolutions ranging from the web right up to flyers and maybe even posters. The logo itself should be attractive both as a centrepiece, as well as having the ability to still look important when sitting somewhere in the background. It should both attract attention when required and blend in and complement other elements in other situations.
There was one major change that I wanted to make when redesigning the concept for Symetris - while the logo for Balanced Bodies was quite long and well suited to a letterhead, I wanted to make the new logo more of a shorter rectangular shape. Ideally it would be slightly less than twice as wide as it was high. It should also be adaptable into different aspect ratios (such as almost a square) and be able to "fit" into a wider variety of situations. I wanted it to be simpler than the Balanced Bodies concept, but at the same time look more professional.
Original logo used as a basisAfter thinking about a few different ideas, the answer became obvious - simply use one of the figures from the existing logo and try to adapt it using the new design goals. This brought certain advantages: speed (no need to reinvent the wheel) and the fact that we helped to create a bridge from the old brand into the new. Due to the fact that the figure on the right had the closest aspect ratio to a square, I decided that this would be the starting point for the new concept.
In the next section we will explore various concepts using the chosen silhouette...
» Read about the next stage in » "Logo step 1: Expanding the design"
