Established in 2020, Velo Renovation is a contracting company working to reduce its carbon footprint. Staff all ride bicycles, move tools and supplies on bicycles, and use vehicles only when absolutely necessary and for the delivery of large product loads. You can read more about the story of Velo's creation and recent succeses at the Winnipeg Free Press.
I was approached by my friend and Velo's founder, Nate DeAvila, to create a distinct and eye-catching brand as well as help style a basic website to help get the company on its feet.
As with many social enterprises, the budget was low, and it would be a challenge to place bicycles front and centre in the brand without creating another campy and boring bicycle graphic. Like any North American cities, Winnipeg has many cycling organizations and businesses, and making a distinct bicycle symbol is tricky.
Meeting the challenge head on, the final logo we created invokes a bicycle, a bicycle trailer, a wagon, and a structure -- all at the same time. The style is evocative of architectural renderings in its precision and flat perspective shapes, and the triangles are suggestive of flags and of Velo's confidence and pride in championing bicycle-based contracting. Or it just looks like a party on wheels, which is also an accurate depiction of Velo's work culture.
Given that the new company would be working with a wide array of unanticipated surface (and intended to build custom bicycles and trailers), we created several different versions of the logo and even custom letterhead in anticipation of many different needs.
The logos, graphics, and website all make use of a geo-grotesk ultra-bauhaus typeface with quirks aplenty that immediately felt tailor-made for Velo as soon as I came across it-- Sawton by Atipo Foundry. For additional longer copy, we went with Hanken Design's Glacial Indifference.
As a part of the branding, I helped Velo style a basic Wordpress site in Elementor with our fantastic branded typefaces.
The site places front and center the tangible evidence of Velo's impressive work so far - live counters of distances travelled, carbon saved, and successful jobs completed.
In addition to the very typical staff shirt, the brand has been wrapped on a few unique surfaces, notably on the downtubes of custom built bicycles! Refer again to the Winnipeg Free Press article to see this in action.
Multiple concepts were explored in the creation of the logo. Initially, the client was deciding how much Velo's brand impression should be associated with building technologies and not just the use of bicycles, and that is reflected in a concept that sees pedals applied to the house itself.
Additional work was done to determine how to vary the density across the image, which way the bicycle should face, and how it would interact with colour, all before arriving at the final logo configurations.
After further discussions, we decided to embrace the use of colour in the logo, with unique overlapping dyanmics between solid colour and solid white spaces creating distinct impressions.
Additionally, the clients themslves made business cards using the logo using the basic branding principles we drew up, something I wholeheartedly support.
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