Project Name: FRS Learn
Software Used: Adobe Illustrator
This was a key project I undertook during my year’s work experience at Kent Fire and Rescue Service. This was a national project involving all the various county fire services and involved redesigning the logo for the national learning platform. The project took approximately four months and involved dealing directly with the ‘National Hub’ and ended when I had to present my work to the National Fire Chief’s Programme Office.
I was asked to first review the current logo (Image on the left) and web site and then create various options for how this could be refreshed. My initial view of the existing logo was that it was suitable for its audience but did not tie up with the branding that was being used elsewhere on the website and the Fire Service in general.
The font for the logo was pre-defined by the National Council and therefore it was not open to be altered. However the iconography and the colour pallete were open to be changed. In principle, the colour pallete was limited to those appropriate for the fire service (i.e. a base colour of red plus other more neutral colours to highlight the red) although I did experiment with the colours red (Fire Service), blue (Police) and green (NHS) to represent the emergency services.
The core thesis was to promote on-line learning and personal development. As such, I considered a range of educational style icons. These included a computer graphic (representing online), a graduation mortarboard (focusing on learning), scroll (which represent a school certificate). Each of these ideas were blended with various background shapes which covered a badge (which is a core feature of many Fire Service logos), fire (showing the blend of learning focusing on fire protection), computer background and other more general background shapes.
In practice there were multiple iterations of the various backgrounds, icons, colours and even wording. (See above)
In December 2019, I gave an in-person presentation to seven representatives of the National Fire Service in London. My presentation went through my thinking, all the various design options I had considered and my final proposal. The meeting along with questions from the representatives lasted approximately an hour. The final decision was to go with my proposal but to make a number of minor amendments connected with the weighting of text and positioning of icons.
With the final piece to the right.
