BRAND IDENTITY - LOGO DESIGN

Disney

The Lion King
Broadway

The Challenge

Designing a Brand Architecture System to Be Future Fit

The key strategy of OWN - Oprah Winfrey Network as a global brand is to create meaningful connections with diverse audiences.

A media landscape that is crowded, complex and challenging to capture a viewers attention demands a simple, elegant and friendly design system that is consistent and repeatable.

Brand Identity Messaging is Always On™

An Icon for a
Timeless Heroic Coming of Age Story

Logo design is a complex form of engineering. Graphic Designers are capable of aligning sight, sound, color, texture, light and forms into a highly distilled and powerful communication symbol.

A logo transmits the entire essence of the a brand story and evokes emotion in a single glance. An iconic logo has a timeless intrinsic feel and is instantly recognizable. It is a treasure trove of high value for any brand property as it occupies hearts and minds while evoking positive emotions and love.

A Brand Identity Design Has Infinite Possibilities

Knowing the one solution that works best requires going through a process of discovering what doesn’t work.

Design is Discovery

Form Follows Function

Fun with Purpose

The initial iterations of the logo design were all drawn by hand before being re-drawn digitally. Disney provided a handful of press-released photographs of Julie Taymour's sketches, and the costumes under construction on Broadway for reference.

Masks were carved out of clay, there were sunset-warm Earthy colors, a plethora of natural grasses, feathers and textures combined with vibrant African bogolanfini mud cloth patterns.

Creating an iconic symbol with timeless appeal takes a high degree of immersion and focus. We took a trip to the bookstore in Santa Monica to pick up more African pattern and reference books. Everything we could get our hands on showed uneven lines and textures, all evidence of everything being created by hand.

"I wanted to be surrounded by every essence of the show," said logo designer and art director, Mary Ellen Schrock. Every African tribal texture and graphic pattern we could find that resembled the photographs was tacked up on the walls."

Iconic masks and animal shapes were emerging as prominent forms from from all of the African graphic references It became evident that if the icon could resemble the Lion King mask it would resonate deeply and capture the essence of the show

FLOH CREATIVE - OWN OPRAH WINFREY NETWORK REBRAND

A Timeless Story Always On™

Like rewiring, a rebrand is about making stronger connections to increase the return on investment

FLOH CREATIVE DESIGN - DISNEY THE LION KING BROADWAY

ICONIC
BOLD
EXPRESSIVE
MEMORABLE

Getting to the balanced icon design that captured the essence of the show "took many versions," says Mary Ellen. "We presented four rounds with hundreds of different versions and revisions. Disney typically explores every option to get to the undoubtable winner, the "one."

Another influencing factor in the logo creation was the show music. But the music from the show was still in production and unavailable as a recording. "I managed to find a copy of a CD, "The Rhythm of the Pridelands", said Mary Ellen, "which featured African singers performing acappella versions of songs that are in the musical."

One song in particular stood out as being very powerful, " 'He Lives In You'. When I heard that song acappella," she said, "the African voices were so other worldly and harmonic. It lifted me and gave me chills; absolutely sensational. I was working on the Lion King shape and the look on the facewas the signal I'm getting to the core essence of what I'm creating. It's alignment and it's really, powerful and pure aspect of design."

Get in touch to learn about the Always On™ Brand Identities we’re creating for Warner Bros., Discovery, Coca-Cola, Disney and more

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