Recently, Paper Leaf Design was offered the opportunity to rebrand 3rd Street Beat Entertainment – a group that offers hip-hop dance instruction, as well as show promotions and other related services. It’s always a nice break to get away from corporate design and be able to work with a company based in the arts, whatever branch of the arts that might be. New challenges present themselves, and it’s a good way to avoid getting into any sort of design rut, so we were all over it.
The challenge with this redesign was to make an identifiable & timeless logo for the overarching “parent company” of 3SB, as the gents behind 3SB also run Hip Hop for Hope, Santa’s Kids, Artists Emerge and more under this brand. We needed a logo that maintained a professional look-and-feel, but still spoke a bit to the nature of what 3SB does (without being too literal). The goal was to create something that balanced strength & confidence with movement. Here are the old 3SB identities:
As you can see, the old logo made use of the easy-to-remember acronym 3SB. However, the design suffers a bit with the combination of a harsh radial gradient in the background, along with a dated 3D effect and questionable typeface choice.
Another version of their logo (how this was used, I’m unsure):
This version just has too much going on to be effective. The legibility suffers thanks to the busy nature of the design, and while the radial gradient was carried over, it still doesn’t look very good. There’s no 3SB acronym, and while the silhouettes in the background make it clear that 3rd Street Beat has something to do with dance, the design isn’t the strongest.
Here is the new logo, designed by Paper Leaf:
Hit the jump to see the black on white version! (more…)
