Peter Maher of Mahers Sports Therapy asked us to transform his sports therapy company from a family named business into an international sports brand that offers expert services in sport therapy, nutrition, orthotics and coaching. Peter already had a name in mind, Areté. Peter even had Areté tattooed to his shoulder under his Olympic rings he earned by competing in the 1988 Seoul and 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

Areté is a Greek word which means goodness, excellence, or virtue of any kind, to achieve fulfillment of purpose or function: the act of living up to one’s full potential. Areté also means courage and strength in the face of adversity in ancient Greek culture.

It was a word that resonated with Peter, as the Areté philosophy of courage and strength in the face of adversity is what he strove for as an Olympic Athlete and one of Canada’s most successful marathon athletes of all time.

We took Peter’s vision on board and got to work. After much research and design development we decided to design a hand drawn font for the name Areté and incorporate Mount Olympus (right) in the logo to show where the origins of the Areté philosophy came from. For the colour we chose an aqua/sky blue hue that is a uniquely Greek colour once more to highlight the Greek origins of the name.

We are currently working on the Areté website and hope to launch it very soon. Below is an image of Peter and a taste of the style of graphics we are putting into the website. Stay tuned for the launch!

Ever wondered how sweets are made? Visit a Papabubble Sweet Shop and you’ll be shown exactly how its done! Papabubble have stores in Barcelona, New York City, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Seoul, Taipei and Lisbon shown below… Papabubble can do any sort of sweet you may request from personalised sweets to different mixture of flavours right before your own eyes. Its an excellent franchise that is very well branded and their sweets taste great!

Best branding practice is to generally keep the design simple. Strong two colour brands that can be reproduced well in black & white, printed clearly small or on fabric is a sign of an effective design. However to design a simple logo that engages the viewer is the difficult bit. I’ve highlighted two examples of simple but brilliantly designed logos that engage the viewer, FedEx and P+T logos are very similar in their subtle visual cleverness.

Federal Express old logo below was in need of a brand refresh so when they rebranded in 1994, they decided to reflect their ‘nickname’ FedEx in their identity.

When designing the new logo, the designers introduced a quirky feature, a subtle arrow between the ‘E’ and the ‘x’, see the pink arrow right. The close proximity of both letters to each other gave the logo type an arrow in negative space without inferring with the original typeface itself. The logo itself was applauded for its cleverness and simplicity by introducing an arrow that suggested forward movement.

Thirty years earlier, P&T (1969)- Post and Telegraphs logo was designed by Irish designer Damien Harrington in the famous Kilkenny Design Workshops. The P+T logo was quite a shift from conventional Irish design at the time. It was a type of modern logo that wasn’t being designed in Ireland at the time. The  lowercase initials of Post and Telegraphs were used to great effect by introducing a plus sign (+) in between by using negative space. It was quite the achievement to design such a modern logo at the time but even more impressive was the design was accepted by an obviously forward thinking Post and Telegraph.

The subtle, smart and humourous qualities of both the FedEx logo and P+T logo are very obvious. FedEx were applauded for their forward thinking rebrand but Damien Harrington’s P+T rebrand is every bit as impressive today as it was 40 years ago when it was designed in the Graphic design section of the Kilkenny Design Workshops.