Case Study: The Tree Bar's New Look
When the Columbus landmark music club was brought back to life under new ownership, Kinopicz was tasked with designing a new identity for a new era. The new owner wanted to keep key elements of past logos of the known and loved brand while projecting a reassuring new look that matched the improvements and overall “refreshening” of the club’s experience.
Kinopicz worked closely with the client over many iterations of logo development before providing a customized web experience to match. We asked our design team to show off the results of our team’s collaboration and take you on a tour of how the final Tree Bar logo came about.
Bob Cabarcas, Kinopicz designer:
The Tree Bar came to us for a logo that would embody the new harmony emerging from Columbus's favorite dive bar: a modern revisitation of vintage European punk infused with the bar's well known, run down allure.
Several precise balances would need to be struck for the logo to be successful. The mark required just the right relationship between grungey & clean, vintage & modern, attractive & low key.
Our initial explorations stemmed from the knowledge that the bar's iconic silver maple had been felled. These early concepts featured the likeness of a tree stump and organic type styles. A bud of modern renovation can be seen in the unobtrusive linear geometry and distinctly human feel of a preliminary font selection: Neutraface.
Progressing with continued client dialogue, we focused our revisions of the logo more directly on modern rock, at first simplifying, then all together dropping, the image of a tree.
The final rendition also eliminated any distress or grunge from the logo itself. Such elements were deemed best suited as textural accents in branded collateral.
Our concept on completion is contained – much like the Tree Bar's patrons – within a dark, intimate space. Chromatic and bold sans-serif typography contained within an aggressively angled, black rhombus represent the venue's housing of diverse, high energy musical acts. The rhombus trims off a portion of the final "R" in Tree Bar, a subtle harkening to the late silver maple.
