SV
OBJECTIVE
SV's mission statement is simple; To reduce poverty in the Philippine by empowering and enabling entrepreneurship.
WORK DONE
Client: SV
Role: Creative Direction & production.
The company had a clear mission statement and they seem to genuinely care about helping folks out in the Philippines. There is a lot of talent over there but resources can be scarce.
I started playing around with the the letters "S" & "V" to see if anything would click. Mine and the client's mentality was to do something that felt VC-ish but with a little more heart/warmth as well. The client had sent me some references to logos/groups that they liked and some of them had some illustrative images, so I started to also play around around with sketching ants (cause they're trying to help the little guy) and subtle heart imagery (because this company genuinely cares).
After doing some rough pencil sketches, the clients and I were able to whittle down a direction they wanted to go. Blatant imagery was not the route they wanted to go, so I got rid of a "mascot" and started veering towards more subtle imagery.
PROCESS
After talking some more and picking out some of the sketches they liked, I went to digital sketching to do variants and explore the options even more. They leaned into the idea of subtly incorporating a heart and I went to town drawing. I didn't want to hammer the viewer with a HEART, so I kept the heart shape to a subtle shape around the "SV" icon explorations. After some explorations, I noticed that some of the "SV" sketches started to take shape into a bird. I pointed this out to the client and said it is was like SV was giving these young entrepreneurs their "wings" and helping them grow. They were super into the idea, I had a direction and I was able to knock out a few more rough sketches for the client to check out. Results are below.
With an even clearer direction now in place, I was able to explore wordmarks with the client. Though the icon wasn't finished, I wanted to explore a wordmark to compliment and inform what the final icon would look like. I wanted the wordmark to be very bold and make it clear that they were a VC but I also wanted to balance it out with the softer logo.
So in English, "Sipag" translates to "diligence." So I wanted to emphasize "SIPAG" because that was going to be the more important part of the brand over "Ventures", the diligence/constant hustle was going to be the focus and we didnt want to take away from that. After the style of wordmark was chosen, we started exploring colors. The client wanted to stick with earth tones and incorporate blue. Through some explorations, the client and I landed on aqua and gold as their colors. We landed on a darker aqua to represent the ocean and this specific shade of gold that could both represent the earth/sand but also the end goal of these young businesses becoming successful.
FINAL THOUGHTS
After some finessing of the logo, which included spacing/sizing/cleaning up edges/exploring shades of colors, we were able to come to a final brand that we were all happy with. We even started building out the site a bit. I really love that the top header is footage one of the founders took when they were visiting the Banaue rice terraces in the Philippines.
This was a fun project for what seems like a positive venture and I can't wait to see the great things that they do.
