Content design isn't an area that I'm overly familiar with. I do touch on it in my everyday work in my placement role and, of course, I've touched on it within university as well. As a fully fledged role with such an emphasis on content, I'm in unfamiliar territory so to speak.
I did a bit of nosing and I found that there is one business already doing this exact thing and that's a business called Frontitude. It seems like they're doing pretty well; however I guess from my lens and my responsibility within this project, their visuals and their design could be a lot better. I guess we do have an opportunity there.
Seeing as the product is a link between system thinking and design systems, but also literature and writing in that sense, it seems like there's a clear distinct identity already within that: some kind of digital literary tool with that line of thinking. I guess, looking at a symbol or logo, I've been imagining books, a bookmark, and speech bubbles but they all feel kind of flat and not uninteresting, but easy. Not that I have anything against easy, it just doesn't feel like it. If that makes sense, it's an area that I'm really struggling with at the moment.
Those early mockups that I mentioned before use a colour palette mainly consisting of white, black, and grey, and then as a kind of primary brand colour, a nice blue, kind of boy blue if you will. While it's something to work with, it also doesn't really add much to the identity that I have to work with. Considering blue is quite a passive colour, in my opinion, quite a popular colour as well, it does have connotations but none of them are really attached to that kind of digital literary tool identity that I described before. It feels like a bad place to draw from in all honesty.
With that in mind I've been looking more at creating perhaps a wordmark, with that literary side in mind, looking at serifs or script type. This is a good avenue. I think it has more legs than creating a symbol like a bookmark or something but it's just about finding the right typeface and considering any alterations we can make to it that would make it unique as well.
A really big constraint I have with this project is that the other member, my founder member who proposed the idea, actually lives in Australia. The communication is very minimal as they've also just had a child. They're very busy at the moment, which is good. It means the gas isn't fully on the pedal so I can take my time. It does mean it's very hard to gauge what they're after, seeing as it isn't my idea or my project per se. It's definitely more their child, if you will. I'm trying to tread carefully with that one but it's very easy to fall into the trap of not communicating at all. It's definitely something I've noticed that's causing a bit of strain for myself.