Central Otago Fork Trucks (COFT) is the brainchild of "30-year Forklift engineer" veteran Eddie. Striking out on his own in the beautiful southern island of New Zealand, he contacted me to request a simple stamp style logo, limited to 3 colours, that could scale across his new business. From hats to mats, stickers to billboards. The result is a geometric minimalist icon.
As part of the "Logocore 30 day challenge", I was tasked with making a variety of Logos from well constructed breifs provdied by Logocore. This one was a particular favourite of mine as I love the Zelda franchise.
THE CHALLENGE
Eddie new he wqanted a symbol to demonstrate the niche of his business, however he couldnt explain in what style he wanted it. The text was to be "simple, strong, and modern", which naturally lead into Slab Sans Serif fonts. Finally he wanted the local colours and iconography of the region to be present in the logo. Otago is represented by blue lakes, tall mountains, and yellow skies.
THE SOLUTION
First we established a sliding scale of complexity so Eddie could visualise the options and styles. I placed example from his competitors on the spectrum too and we paired this with the competitive audit findings. Given that the logo would need to be extremely scalable to fit on the range of medium Eddie had planned, we agreed on a simple icon, that didnt lean too much into abstract shapes.
The colour scheme is a slightly adjusted palette taken from the regions flag, the contrast and hues were changed slightly to improve visibility at distances up to 50m. The mountain ranges were stacked above the rippling lake bars to allude strongly to the pride of the region. Finally these elements were placed on the forks of the truck to demonstrate how " COFT is carrying Otago, lifting it up, with pride".
