KITA LOKAL
I have some exciting news! So for the past few days, I've been secretly working on a project with my friend Lam whom I previously went for tuition with back in secondary school. So it started like this, I posted up a message on my Instagram story looking for brands to collaborate with in designing logos and stuff. Initially I was just looking for upcoming fashion brands that needed a logo design or a revamp of some sort. The response was pretty great and I got requests from packaging designing for a bakery, to ketchup label designing and even t shirt designing for an ice cream parlour all the way from Hawaii! Okay, I admit it was my bad for not specifying that I would prefer a fashion brand but it was really cool and interesting to get all these responses from the people that helped me out.
After getting numerous responses that weren't too suitable for my line of work, I was feeling slightly stressed out about what to do next. That was until Lam messaged me and told me about KITA LOKAL, an organization he's starting with a team of people. KITA LOKAL is basically a place that links local charity organizations and startups with volunteers or talents. The founders of KITA LOKAL noticed that many charity organizations and startups in Malaysia lack of resources and help, so KITA LOKAL is here to link mostly students to them and helping both sides grow.
Even though it isn't fashion related, I felt like it was a great opportunity for me to work with an actual client in a live project. Also, being able to see my work come to life for a real organization would be absolutely fulfilling. Furthermore, it's for a good cause! I mean, it would be a no brainer for me to pass up this once in a lifetime opportunity.
Photo credits to owner
So I started my designing process by looking through samples on the symbols of unity, togetherness, helping and basically all things related to linking one another. These were some of the few I got for inspiration.
Then, I did some sketches on several logo variations on these symbols that stuck to the minimal theme. I decided to go with the main shape as a circle because it symbolizes unity the most and in Chinese belief, family gathering dinners (团圆饭) are best done on a round table. Hence, the amount of round logos. I still did one without a circle but somehow it just doesn't seem much like a charity organization that brings people together compared to the round ones. The short listed logo was logo B which was actually my favourite and shortlisted symbol was symbols 1 and 4.
It was the first time I used a stylus to draw on Illustrator which made the designing process a lot faster and easier since drawing is what I'm good at. I wondered why didn't I use my roommate's super cool Windows laptop for illustrator sooner as I would have saved so much time!
Anyway, here's the end design for both symbols in two different fonts. We ended up choosing the bottom right one because the word's "KITA LOKAL" popped out better and the hand in hand symbol looked nice.
On to the colouring process, at first I wanted to colour in the hands instead of simply leaving colours on all the outlines. But I got a sneak peak of the website and felt like minimal still would look better.
So this is the end product of the logos in colour! The background is going to be transparent but I just made it pink so the white could be noticeable. As you can see, there's some gaps between the curves and the alphabets so "KITA LOKAL" could be seen clearer and the font is slightly different and more hipster to appeal to young people. It's the same font as the website so everything would look in sync. I got the colour scheme from one of the pages in the website which you can see from the previous gif.
So which one made it in the end?
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Photo credits: KITA LOKAL
They picked the white one in the end so it would stand out from the background!
Anyway, do check out KITA LOKAL to find out more on how to be a volunteer in making a better world! Although it is still under the initial stages but don't be shy to inquire if you feel passionate about volunteering!
Overall, I'm really blessed to have this opportunity to work on a live project and having it shown to the world feels like a dream, especially for a beginner like me. I hope that this organization would be a success because I think the idea is great and I'd definitely volunteer myself when I have the time to.
