OUGD406 - Studio Brief 3 Study Task - Tower Works

To start off studio brief 3, we were given a 1 day brief in our set groups to come up with a concept and brand identity for Tower Works Leeds.
My group was Me, Polly, Joel, Liam and Paayal (who is away on holiday). Once we were given the brief we first decided to research Tower Works and find out what exactly it was. 

Tower works is an old listed building that used to be a factory, and is now used as office space for creatives. It has big windows and is surrounded by open space, and is seen as a landmark of Leeds. The factory that it once was used to make wire and pins. This is the current logo:

None of the group felt like it was really suitable for Tower Works, it looked very corporate and aggressive with the bold condensed typeface. The type looks separate from the images and there is a lot of wasted space. 

We started brainstorming some ideas and factors of tower works that would be applicable to use in the new concept.  We thought about keeping the idea of the 3 towers, and representing them some way, rather than just having a vectorised image of them. We wanted something that would work in all sizes and would be recognisable. After a while, we came up with the concept of 3. We would use the number 3 in all of our design decisions, for example, the rule of thirds for laying out a website or flyer and the use of 3 colours.
Once we had our concept, we all started drawing down quick ideas and sketches of what we thought was most appropriate. 

 We decided that this design was the most appropriate. It combines the two W's in Tower Works and combines it with the concept of 3. We began to move this design onto the computer and play around with the typefaces.

We felt that this design would look  best with a bold condensed typeface, because of the W being very thin and long. The other typefaces don't really look right with it. We started to develop this design further and add some colours. 

We wanted to include the red-ish colour from the bricks of the building, as it's listed and the architecture is important to our culture. We decided this colour was too red, and changed it to a more burnt orange colour. 

After that, we added a blue to compliment the orange, and decided on a body text:

Me and Polly thought this blue made the overall feel quite masculine, with the condensed typeface and dark colours. We decided to change the blue to a lighter shade, and thought it worked much better:

Once we had a colour scheme we could design the rest of the collateral:

I think that the final solution for this brief is quite effective. I still think that it's bold and quite aggressive, much like the original logo, but now it works better and can be used on a wide variety of things as we have one single logo. Overall I'm quite happy with it, but I don't think it would have been the direction I would have gone with if I was working on my own.