Bournemouth Road Veterinary Centre:
Logo design project.

Project Requirements:

• New logo/brand identity

Project Brief:
Bournemouth Road Veterinary Centre and the Ark-Aid Veterinary Centre required a new identity that displays their expertise in the veterinary arena and stood them apart from their local competitors, displaying qualities of experience and integrity.

The identity should be clean, contemporary and should embody the practice of pet health care. The identity should be universal and work across both clinics. Ideally one icon should be used alongside suitable typefaces to imply an umbrella brand where the two existing clinics and any future clinics can be immediately identified as belonging to the same group of practices.

The text cloud above represents some of the discovery methods we use to explore the company's existing qualities and values and is always a good starting point for any identity project we undertake.

Part of the brief was to brand all the existing marketing documents currently used in both practices, so it was decided that a uniform brand style would be the best option for this project to save cost when printing and allow brand cross over between each branch.

The client had voiced their own ideas about what they thought the logo should be and the use of the "First aid" cross was a requirement so we set about creating some quite "Pet" specific designs incorporating the 3 main animals each centre dealt with; dogs, cats and rabbits.

This first round of designs helped the client to focus their intentions and it was deemed that they did not want to be quite so literal with the use of the cross or the animals and they had an idea to use a simple paw print. We all agreed that this was probably a widely used icon and didn't provide a strong icon for them but we developed some options to help the client decide.

This project was in no way a typical project, in that after discussions with the client we concluded that we needed to take a totally different route with the identity and settled on the fact that both centres were based on the South coast and we should look at maybe illustrating this point and play on the fact that the surgery felt local and use some of the aspirations of the customers that live near the coast line.

The following designs stemmed from this concept and with the use of some stock photos we created the building blocks of the final concept

The concept below takes a very illustrative approach using a boat and seagull with an abstract sky and beach to create a strong icon that works with both locations.

The final design works across both centres' identities and is the perfect starting point for developing the marketing materials suite that were required to fulfill this project.

The last item to be tackled was the company's strapline. It was agreed that the old strapline "Your best friend is our best friend" no longer aligned itself with the new design. "Caring for South Coast pets!" was a stronger message, positioned the centres' geographically and still represented the caring qualities that the project sought to envelop at the start.

See examples of the marketing materials we created with this brand in part 2 of this veterinary practice design case-study.

If you would like to talk with a designer to discuss how Proactive can help you to achieve the best from your identity design, please call us on 0800 412 5333 or...