Hi guys welcome back to our channel the number one place for people who have design art and
all things creative you are watching D & B's Channel my name is Laszlo and
today we are going to redesign the logo type treatments of animated feature films made by
Dreamworks Animation Studios I have picked three Classic Movies we all know and love
namely Chicken Run Shark Tale and the Bee Movie we are going to have a good look at
the original title treatments and have a little bit of a graphic design based
play to see how we could tweak these word marks in interesting ways okay let's do it
now how are we going to tackle these logo redesigns let's talk strategy in my experience
when it comes to rebranding and redesigning already existing graphic assets designers can
easily fall into certain traps right sometimes you would see a brand refresh only to realize
that they seemingly haven't changed anything we all have seen presentation decks like that
beautifully crafted long posts all about how the designer maybe tilted the original logo like
-3 degrees or changed the original gray color to a 10 percent darker grey a 'greyer grey' changes
no one in their right mind would actually notice basically I'm sure you have seen all these kinds
of posts they are all over social media The Other Extreme is when a designer seemingly disregards
every established brand guideline and makes something that looks and feels nothing like the
original piece of design that they were supposed to redesign and Rebrand which is oftentimes the
result of basing all the creative choices and decisions on Personal Taste and opinion rather
than actual research so my strategy here is quite simply finding ways to make sure that
my work stays in between these two extremes I want to build on the original logos and tweak them in a
way that feels new but also respects the original Creative Vision yeah let's start with movie number
one chicken run from the year 2000 now Chicken Run is a collaboration between Dreamworks Animation
Studios and the Bristol based Aardman animation who have created Wallace & Gromit or Shaun the
Sheep if you are familiar now I don't know how many of you know this but essentially the whole
plot of chicken run is a spoof of this classic movie entitled The Great Escape starring Steve
McQueen which is one of those classic Prison Break type movies from 1963. The Great Escape
with chickens was essentially the idea that the Aardman guys pitched to DreamWorks's Executives
including Steven Spielberg who reportedly listened to the pitch and then said well since he owns a
chicken farm and since the Great Escape is one of his favorite movies he is absolutely
on board so he greenlit the project right there and then according to Legend of course now I'm
telling you all of this because my theory is that the chickenrun logotype looks and feels
the way it does because it has also been inspired by these classic Great Escape marketing materials
big block type based No Nonsense lettering with a slight army-like stencil effect I have used this
as my starting point for the Rebrand but instead of trying to find a font which could perfectly
mimic these letter forms I thought I would just sketch these out myself by hand to begin with
I put my hand drawings onto Photoshop to trace these over after which I played
around with a couple different layouts just to see what composition will look best here
I briefly played around with the idea of bringing in an actual Chicken Coop into the
design I thought it would be quite funny if we made a spoof of the Home alone logo but it just
didn't feel right it was a spoof within a spoof so I dropped the idea very early on besides I
wanted to make sure that this title would look good as a simple one-liner of text so after all
this I moved my drafts into illustrator for vectorizing here I set up a simple grid and
traced over my work by creating perfect straight lines and rectangles here and there I added these
little chippings onto the ends as I thought it would be quite interesting to mimic the look and
feel of wooden panels as if the title itself was built by the same material as an actual Chicken
Run would this is essentially not much more than a classic pen tool exercise I had to do to build up
these black Strokes after which once it was all done I switched the whole thing to color-fills
I debated for a while if I should keep the stroke lines white and use them as separators
between all these different shapes because again that would make the letters feel like they have
been made by individual pieces of wood you know nailed together but to be honest I just didn't
like the effect it created it made the design look a little bit football jersey-esque to Me
So eventually I ended up joining all these different parts of the respective letters to
each other just so they would look like you know well simple filled up letters
on its own the wordmark looked a little bit too clean for my taste so once I was ready to pop
this into context I added a bunch of textures a little bit of wear and tear a little bit of drop
shadow that kind of thing in Photoshop you know to make it look a bit more handmade like this
whole movie essentially this claymation feels very handmade isn't it so here they are side by
side the original title treatments and my version on the poster which one do you prefer let me know
down in the comments if you want now the second movie title logo I have looked at was SharkTale
from 2004 which is essentially another parody type movie this time dreamworks was making fun
of the classic gangster movies like The Godfather and Martin Scorsese's body of work who actually
have voiced one of the characters in the movie funnily enough did you guys remember that I
didn't the logo this movie has been marketed with is this very simple wordmark yeah now if
you're a fellow graphic designer like myself you probably agree with the common opinion that yellow
well it's just a horrible color and I tend to advise people not to use it 99 percent of the time
the thing is shades of yellow often look illegible it tend to not come out nicely in print and it's
just headache material really still DreamWorks went with it plus they also put a bright red
stroke around the letters as well Brave very brave now I'm just making educated guesses here but I
think they did this because these colors make the logo stand out extremely well on dark bluish Hues
which obviously have been used quite a lot in this movie all about sharks under the sea in fact if
you take a look at some of these earlier title treatments made by the original designer you see
how it was meant to be more sea like color wise in the beginning when you look at this logo Evolution
you gather that the movie went through a couple different possible titles so the designer had to
make sure that his work stays adaptable in terms of the concept hence we have this no-nonsense
simple type solution one striking creative decision is this hidden shark fin here which
I thought was kind of cool it's something we can work with so again I started the ideation by doing
some quick sketches in which I put this shark fin idea well not only in the negative space of the
letter H but pretty much everywhere else I could as well I also wanted to do something interesting
with the capital S at the beginning adding these shark-like shapes onto the end of the letter
as I went along I tried smuggling more and more of these fishy tales and head elements onto the
letters I thought by doing this I could create a kind of coral reefy vibe where there are fish
coming at you from all directions making the design look visually rich and exciting
now eventually after wasting a good afternoon building up all these shark shapes I realized that
I'm steering away way away from the original brief so I just had to stop yeah it happens sometimes
you get in that zone thinking that you are being really really creative only to later on realize
that what you have done is totally irrelevant work yeah so I had to take a step back I made a new
artboard and this time instead of taking the hand lettering approach I started out with a simple
font I hid my shark fins in the letter H in a more subtle way than I did before and I also just
couldn't let go of my swirly shark shapes in the letter S so I simplified all these ideas basically
I messed up some of the edges of these letters as well again to go back to reflecting the unruly
nature of coral reefs and designed a custom letter A which was closer to my initial hand drawing
essentially I was looking for ways to include most of my initial ideas while keeping the general art
Direction closer to the original logo so once all the ideas were put down I started dressing
up the logo into the style DreamWorks came up with I put the letters closer to each other I
added the red outline and this subtle wavy flag effect as well in order to bring my design home
this is what it looks like as opposed to the original title treatment and this is what
the difference it makes when you look at the same poster side by side what do you think I gotta say
I'm pretty happy with this one now for logo design number three I have chosen the Bee Movie from 2007
which I swear I was not aware how much of an online history this movie has it has Jacqueline
who pointed it out to me recently and this movie went through a little bit of a renaissance a
rediscovery over the years as gen Z kids seem to think that it's hilarious and its ability to
deliver top quality memes is somewhat unmatched in the weird and wonderful world of the internet in
terms of the logo they went with a very simple block Capital word Mark with lots of shiny 3D
effects in order to mimic the look and feel of Honey now when you look at the overall look and
feel of the art Direction in the Bee Movie you will find that they made most things look very
organic the character designs the environments everything looks a little bit asymmetric a little
bit wonky imperfect curves and shapes everywhere just like how you'd find most things in nature
right now if you take a totally simple wordmark logo and stick it on top of this kind of natural
looking organic World it will obviously stand out like crazy yeah now this is exactly what I
have to do with my design as well I have to say this logo was probably the most challenging one
out of this whole set for a number of reasons for one I really wanted to stay away from the
usual Bee cliche imagery while designing I didn't want to have black and yellow stripes I didn't
want to have hexagons and all that predictable stuff so instead of all that I started playing
around with relating the word 'bee' with flower petals to create a coherent visual
I had this idea that if I looked at a perfect flower with all its petals I could suggest and
make the audience see and pick out the letters E and B in there somehow if I do it in a clever way
the other tricky aspect was the very Act of making something nice looking with so very little
when you have a nice long word to create with in illustrator using the right font you can easily
make something impressive looking but if you take a very short three lettered word like this one
here in which two letters are actually the same well you suddenly run into much more limitations
now after some experimentation with my script fonts I realized that I don't really like this
90s graffiti inspired style I'm heading towards with my initial flowery idea so I switched back
to some more traditional looking fonts to begin with I ended up combining a couple
different typefaces together for my word Mark and I included my initial flower Motif but I put it
in a much more obvious place again just to steer back to the original designer style and vision
now these dots on the sides are representing the bees going in for pollinating the flower which
I'm fully aware no one in the right mind would actually pick out if I didn't say this out loud
I mean they are just little circles aren't they yeah you know what that's a good lesson here as
well when your Creative Concepts are starting to become more and more abstract that's usually a
good time to stop yeah so after the framework was done I of course had to apply a number of
different effects to make the logo look all shiny and 3D like and voila we got ourselves a new funky
little BEE movie title treatment now let's bring in the original one and then well you be the judge
so this is how my final little DreamWorks title treatment set ended up looking like
in relation to the original word marks which inspired all this design work
I really hope that you find something in this video which you can you know take away and
benefit from to utilize in your design workflow okay our regular creative crew members know
that this channel is not just about logo design but we also talk quite a lot about illustration
interior design decor and architecture and everything else that we think overlaps all
these cool things please leave a like to help us reach even more people with this video and
I hope to see you next time with some other cool and creative stuff okay until then see you guys