Branding: Scaramanga
Research Board 1:
After my initial listen to Glasgow band Scaragmanga’s music, I was grabbing at imagery of shapes, lines and movement. The music captures a lot of emotive response but also makes you want to dance. Knowing now that the singer was in a Bowie tribute band is quite clear in his tone.
I kept thinking about coding, morse code and circuit boards, the simple lines and dots were coming to mind as I listened to the beats. Also throughout the more melodic songs such as the acoustic version of ‘simple love’ I pictured floating, closing eyes and slow dance movements. Overall the songs have an upbeat tone which you can dance along to but are also heavy on the importance of the lyrics and song themselves.
Research Board 2:
After conducting an interview with the 2 band members I noted some main key take-aways. 1. minimal 2. abstract shapes 3. euphoric 4. collaborative, to which I also made a point to note the importance of 3 (originally 3 members of the band). The name was chosen due to the bond villian, Scaramanga having 3 nipples (haha, love it!)
I enjoyed listening to them explain how they bonded over their love of music whilst at gigs and drinking together, again showing that collaborative nature. They seem really passionate about music and emphasised the importance of the feeling it brings them, they feel at home, in the zone and in a trance when creating.
I’ve also gathered the core demograhic is geared towards those who are: young, creative, alternative
They really seem keen on keeping the branding simple with a more serious, modern tone but perhaps some tongue and cheek to the approach as their name implies. I think a clean and minimal approach will work well here.
Research Board 3:
I took a little dive into some other band logos, from more modern designs to older ones. My initial thinking is that this will focus more on the typography of the logo.
I’ve never really thought about The Beatles logo before, but after reading up I was interested to learn that the famous drop-T logo was created to emphasis the word ‘beat’ by using capital B and dropped T.
“In case of a typographic logo, the choice of font is what makes it unique. The creator of the Beatles wordmark did not customise an existing font but created every character from scratch. Today the typeface is called “Bootle”. The name of the band reads cleanly due to the big, solid letters”
The Arctic Monkeys logo from 2011-2017 intrigued me as they used distortion to almost create an illusion of movement within the branding. From research this might have been to echo a flag.
I’m assuming that the Bowie logo was to emulate his famous make-up and hair for Ziggy Stardust era.
I had to take a look at the chemical brothers logo as the Scaragmanga guys mentioned this as an influence for them. This logo was created using the Linotype typeface called Sho Roman. The designers played with the type a little “until the logo looked suitably scratchy yet coherent” This logo gives off a bit of a ‘cut and paste’ vibe with the letters a little smushed together, which was reminiscent of the chemical brothers approach to creating music.
References:
1000logos.net. (2019). 1000 Logos - The Famous Brands and Company Logos in the World. [online] Available at: https://1000logos.net/.
BandLogoJukeBox. (n.d.). BandLogoJukeBox. [online] Available at: https://www.bandlogojukebox.com/ [Accessed 8 Dec. 2021].
