Cran Central Station
- Category: Logo
- Industry: Personal project
- Responsibilities: Logo design
- Launched: August, 2010
- View This Project: See the logos
Project Summary
I recently did some work for the Wareham, Massachusetts based Cranberry Marketing Committee, an organization whose role is to “promote the sale and use of cranberries and cranberry products.” Needless to say, after working with this group, I know more about cranberries that I ever thought I would!
One of the items I worked on for the CMC was a secure portal to track cranberry inventories. In trying to come up with a name for this portal, I had suggested ‘Cran Central Station.’ That name ended up not being used for the project, but for some reason, it stuck with me and I've had this nagging urge to design something using that name for months now. Finally, I decided it was time to get this idea out of my head and create a logo!
I wanted this logo to have a vintage feel to it, but still be fun. I started with a stock illustration of a locomotive that I manipulated and edited to suit my needs. I then added some tracks and a bed of cranberries beneath those tracks. This gave me the main visual element of the logo, which I then wrapped into the circular bounding area that would encapsulate the design.
For the typeface, I knew I wanted to use a nice, thick slab serif and Rockwell Extra Bold was a perfect fit. For the color palette, I started with a rich red to tie into the cranberry aspect of the logo and the muted black and tan just seemed to fall into place as I began pushing pixels.
When the logo design was completed, I decided to do an alternate 'distressed' or 'grunge' version. I actually ended up liking this grunge version better, but I am presenting both of them here in the portfolio.
Overall a really fun little project that I am happy to finally have out of my head and onto my screen!
One more thing - the “Est. 1816” was from the Wikipedia article I read on cranberries, honoring the year when cranberries were first farmed in Cape Cod, Massachusetts!