MOTOR CANVAS

A student project that had me conceptualise a brand and bring it to life, from logo to their real world products.

A branding project around a vintage apparel company with designs heavily inspired by the most iconic liveries in motor sports.

The Brief

This was one of my last units for my course, and this project was heavily focused on creative freedom. The core project was outlined as followed

  • Conceptualise and create a brand that strives to follow sustainable practices.

  • Explore sustainable practices and implement them in the way your brand conducts it’s self

  • Create a style guide for this brand

  • Design packaging for this companies products

  • Create three other touchpoints for this company

Brand Conceptulisation

This section details the actual conceptualisation of the brand. Although it doesn’t feature any of my practices, I wanted to include it as it creates the context of the brand and showcases some critical thought around its creation

The Inspiration

This project came to me at the time I discovered rally racing and I wanted to explore ways to include this new-found passion. After some research and consideration, I decided to work on a vintage apparel company heavily inspired by rally’s most iconic liveries. Furthering this decision process, I decided to allow room for this company to expand into motor sports as a whole.

Strive for Sustainability

This company follows typical sustainable practices such as responsible sourcing, production practices and advocating for sustainability. Where Motor Canvas focuses most of their efforts however, is shifting the culture around Electric vehicles. Identifying that the class of vehicle carries a stigma, Motor Canvas aims to shift the culture around EV’s slowly but surely. Motor Canvas doesn’t neglect the past of fossil fuels and condemn those who continue to use them, rather highlights what Ev’s are capable of and “normalising” them. Motor Canvas understand change is slow, and ramming their narrative down their consumers throat inspires rebellion and they support it by leading by example and using EV’s in their entire logistics fleet.

The Name

After consideration I came up with the name Motor Canvas. A name that simply takes inspiration of the motor vehicles panels being a canvas for the livery. It was important for “Motor” to be broad to allow room for the company to expand into other motor sports.

I created a style scape to get a feeling of what I wanted this brand to look like. Gathering inspiration from multiple resources and websites and patching it all together in the brands aesthetic. Experimenting with typography, graphics and photography, this laid out the idea I wanted to pursue

For the logo, I experimented with different concepts, originally drawing influence from general sports posters of the time using a bold Futura logo type. I tried manipulating the type to create some symbolism of motor sport. I just couldn’t get it right, it was hard to create symbolism without treading in the space of a generic “checkered flag”.

This company creates minimalist renditions of the most iconic liveries, so I wanted the word mark to show a bit more subtlety to support this narrative. I steered away from the bold Futura and decided on a lighter weight serif. Contrasting the nature of motor sports, aligning with the goals of Motor Canvas changing the culture of motor sports