Client: Dakaar | The Recipe App

About the Client: Dakaar is a recipe discovery app for foodies, chef and master chef. It has around 2 lakh+ recipes covering different cuisines.

Brief: Flat logo that falls under the material guidelines of Google, with awesome colors.

And the process begins,

Step 1: Getting the Client to answer the Logo Design Questionnaire

While surfing the internet, I came across this awesome questionnaire prepared by the nuSchool. As you may see, the questionnaire helps in collecting the basic information about the Client and their project. It saves you the trouble of remembering the questions in order to form the creative brief and hence saves a lot of time. Also, it makes you look professional 😉

Here’s the link for it, you may make a copy for your own and modify the questions as per your requirements.

Step 2: Researching about the Client and their product

I always begin my design process with some groundwork meaning researching about the client and the purpose of the design. In this case, the groundwork was spared as I already had a good idea about the client and their product. Client was a good friend.

Step 3: Looking for references, creating mood board

Once you’ve all the requirements in place and a clear idea of Client’s expectations, you can start surfing over the internet for inspiration. I use Invision to create my mood board. It’s a pretty good tool for quickly creating your mood board.

Step 4: Making rough sketches of the concepts

It’s time to put on your thinking cap and start sketching your concepts for the logo mark. You can go digital as well at this moment, but I prefer pen and book since it gives me the creative freedom and saves a lot of time. I don’t stop myself until I’ve 6 to 7 solid concepts.

I shared these concepts with the Client to get their feedback on the same.

I believe in early and continuous feedback, spares me from WTF moment after I’ve spent considerable amount working on the project.

We decided to go ahead with the geometric shapes for the logo mark. The geometric shapes would allow us to incorporate the material guidelines using overlays.

I’ll explain you the logic behind the concept at the end after we get our complete logo.

Tip: Be clear and elaborate neatly on your concepts in order to convince your Client that what you’ve done is the right thing to do.

Step 5: Time to digitize

Black and white has to be the obvious choice of colors when starting to digitize the sketched out concepts. Here’s a digital version of the shortlisted concept for the logo mark.

Step 6: Giving colors to the logo mark

Dakaar being a recipe app, the colors had to be fresh, foody and pleasing. I used pltts.me to pick a color palette for the logo mark. pltts.me has a nice directory of color palettes suitable for different purposes.

Here are a few colored versions of the logo mark,

We decided to go ahead with the orange one since it felt just the right one for the Dakaar’s logo mark.

Step 7: Refining the final logo mark

Refining shouldn’t be a tedious task since by the time we reach this step, we already have a good hang of the entire project.

The key to refining is to forget how much amount of efforts we have taken to design the logo mark and to think from a layman’s perspective to simplify the design.

Step 8: Completing the logo by adding text

We had the logo mark ready, now it was time to add Dakaar and wrap up the project. This can be a tricky step as a lot depends upon the choice of the font. Though it wasn’t a tricky one for me, since the Client had already decided to go with the Avenir font family and Avenir has pretty good fonts to go with.  I used Avenir Pro Bold and played around with its character spacing to achieve the golden ratio.

After trying a few placements for the text around the logo mark, we finally agreed upon this combination.

As promised earlier, here’s the explanation of the logo,

The overlapping triangles resemble the traditional arrangement of the spoon and fork. The arrangement of the three circles resemble the user and a couple of plates. The logo mark as a whole resembles the chef’s hat.

I hope my logo design process may help you while you’re designing one of your logos. You may click here to check out this project on Behance. Feel free to shoot any questions or compliments in the comments section below. You can also tweet them to @WeirdoWizard

A huge shout out to my friends at Dakaar. They’ve been doing a great job trying to help people with recipes. At the moment, they’re only available on Android with over 2 lakh+ recipes, but they’ve many great things lined up. Be sure to check their app on play store and share your invaluable feedback with them.