Energy Efficiency Company Logo Design

James Spooner, owner of a new eco-friendly construction company based in Cheshire, contacted me about creating a new logotype and branding for his start-up, here’s what I came up with…

About the business

Greenovation will specialize in improving building insulation both before and after construction. James will provide air pressure testing and thermal imaging of buildings to find leaks where heat is escaping. Cavity wall inspections with endoscopes will also be offered to his clients. He will produce comprehensive reports after his building inspections and offer help on how to improve energy efficiency in your home or business.

Logo design brief

After reviewing the information that James provided and a quick chat with him on the phone I started sketching out some rough ideas. We agreed that graphic elements such as leaves and house icons would best represent the company and its services. For the colours various shades of green combined with grey were also discussed. The business name is set in one long word, however I did try splitting it on number 4 as you can see above.

The logo needs to be timeless, professional and should look just as good in five, ten or twenty years as it does today. The logo will also need to work in multiple settings from stationery and printed literature to vehicle livery and signage to screen presentations and the web. I therefore needed to choose carefully when it came to selecting typefaces.

Font selection

When it came to deciding what typefaces to use I created a new set in my font library and began adding to it. Sans serif fonts like Avant Garde Gothic, Ubuntu and Frutiger always work well in Eco themes. I used the Adobe Font Finder to help get an idea about what worked best. It has a handy feature where you can type in the letters you plan to use and it displays them in the font style option you’ve selected along with the name.

The word Greenovation has a total of 12 characters which is quite long for the main word in a logo. For this reason I felt any graphic elements needed to be placed above or below the main lettering to prevent the logo from becoming too elongated. However I did try an alternative to this in number 5 and 8 to shake things up a bit.

Graphics and colour for the logo

As explained earlier the plan was to create graphics that represented Eco-friendliness in the building industry. I had already sketched out a few leaf shaped roughs combined with home icons so now it was time to produce some finished artwork. I needed a little more inspiration at this stage to make sure I got things right so I headed over to Nancy Carter’s Pinterest for logo illustration ideas and of course mine and every other designers favourite Dribbble for some great examples of colour work. After a bit more chin scratching and looking out of the window I began working on the vectors with the pen tool on screen.

I separated the “G” to start things off, expanded it to outlines and drew some simple leaf shapes. I created various “home” graphics too and experimented with them in different positions and colours. Concentrating mainly on shades of green things started to take shape. I probably ended up with about 15 different designs before I extracted all the best bits. When I narrowed them all down to the final nine I created the backgrounds and made some final adjustments to the finsihed logo designs.

Each logo design explained in detail

1. I started off with greenovation in Avant Garde Demi. I vector outlined a capital “G” and replaced the tail with the apex of a roof. Then I beefed it up with a 3pt keystroke and set everything against a very dark green background colour, hex #224047. The cap “G” is in a lighter mint green #51B98C with a slight bevel effect.
2. On a light grey background, with some noise added for effect, I’ve again used a capital “G” cut-out of a slightly skewed oval shape filled with a blue to green gradient. Fonts used here are Museo and Candara for the “conserving energy” tag-line. Main colours are a kind of Apple green #94BD33 and Sky blue #2DA3DC.
3. For this one I used Philosopher font in dark grey for the main lettering and Allura regular for the tag-line below which reads “live green, save green”. I created a simple ellipse in Avocado green #5A9600, placed a lower-case white coloured “g” inside and changed the lobe from the neck down into a leaf shape.
4. Breaking the format of all the other logos here I’ve split the main lettering in two so we get “Green” on one line with “Ovation” below. I made up a home icon with rounded corners and filled it with a “British Racing Green” subtle gradient fill. I drew a swirl effect in the shape of a cap “G” inside the graphic to represent air-flow inside the building. Hexadecimal colour references for this logo are #153B1C dark green, mid green #00632D and light green #37A569. I created the background in Photoshop with the brick effect filter over a very light lime green background.
5. Starting with the background I mixed a yellow green colour, simply spray painted the edges with a daker colour green and applied a noise filter for an earthy effect. I created a simple leaf and stem graphic growing out for the tag-line which reads “energy saved is energy made”. The fonts I used here are Signika bold in light grey for the main wording and Cabin italic for the tag-line.
6. For this version I recreated my take on a logo design for “Urban Green” which used a similar format. My version replaces the city skyline with simple house icon surrounded by a “G” and larger leaf in place of the tail. The colours I used here are more subtle, a light pistachio green #70A77D and slightly darker sea green #4E6D55. Fonts are Maven Pro black and Frutiger bold italic.
7. Okay for this design its back to basics, a nice slab serif font, Bree and Ubunto italic. I created another simple leaf effect growing from the ascender on the “t” with everything in lower-case. The background is a deep forest green gradient from an offset centre outwards to a darker shade. I used shades of lime green for the main parts of this logo and a light grey for the tag-line.
8. I was inspired by another logo with this design where the stem of a leaf morphed into an arrow pointing up at 45° to the right. So I created my own more compact version, flipped horizontally and positioned to the right of the main lettering. Fonts used here are, yes you guessed it, Ubuntu medium italic because its just a great all round contemporary font. The tag-line is set in Asap which I recently found on Google fonts. I’ve gone for a nice clean silvery grey background with crisp shades of green and dark grey for the main elements.
9. Finally for the last option I’ve gone for a moody sophisticated approach on the colours and simple layout with no tag-line. I saw an outline of a house where the bottom corner inverted into a circle by another designer which suited this quite well. I decided to do my own version with a leaf, heavier key-line and rounded corners everywhere except the tip of the leaf. The font is Expletus sans in lower-case and filled with a grass green colour #3A8F05. The house and leaf graphic is filled with a very subtle green gradient.

It would be great to hear your thoughts about the logos above. If you have any suggestions with possible ways to enhance any of the designs above then please leave a comment below. You might already have your favourite and a good idea about which one will work best for James’s new business, if so then tell is which logo design you think is best. All feedback as ever is welcomed so please get it touch and help James with his decision making.

Thanks folks