Deep Fried Films identity design | Work | Shark Attack: a design studio

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Project notes
Images

Project notes

Project type

Creation of a company brand identity for this Canadian film production company to help distinguish them from the pack.

Requirements

John, the company director at Deep Fried Films did not want the new business identity to be boringly poe-faced and conservative; he was keen to inject a bit of fun and humour into the design. At the same time, the visuals needed to be able to stand out from the sea of paper that clutters every studio executive’s desk.

Challenges

The main challenge was to devise a logo that was distinctive, suitably eye-catching, and made people smile a little bit. After that it would need to be applied to the usual raft of office stationery; at the time of commission, the list for this stood at:

letterheading
Business cards
Adhesive mailing labels
Compliment slips

Solution

Deep Fried deals primarily with Hollywood, but it is resolutely a Toronto-based company and it’s proud of the fact. The client was quite keen to play up the Canadian angle as long as it was fun and didn't fall into the Maple Leaf cliché.

The solution arrived at was to play on the company name and the deep-seated Canadian love of doughnuts to create a logo that tied the two together. To give it some extra visual impact it was decided to render the doughnut in the logo in harsh, posterised black and white, whilst placing it upon a lurid background of shocking day-glo pink (the garish PANTONE 806, to which the computer screen cannot really do justice).

This shocking pink would be carried through all of the stationery items, and the colour would be printed as a solid on the reverse of items like the letterhead, the business card, and the compliment slip. This had several benefits:

A two-ink design kept printing costs down
If the company’s invoice or letter was turned face down on the desk of a studio exec, it would sit like a lurid pink beacon, demanding attention.

The result was memorable, distinctive, irreverent, and highly cost-effective. Deep Fried’s new identity and its implementation garnered appreciative comments from the first day that it was rolled out.

Client reaction

This client has kindly submitted a public testimonial. See what John Brownlow has to say about Shark Attack on the testimonials page.

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Images

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Logo

Both memorable and amusing, with its hard graphical black and white on a lurid pink field, Deep Fried Films’ logo embraced the Canadian doughnut fetish all the way.

PANTONE 806 and Black.

Stationery

The reverse of each item of stationery (with the exception of the mailing stickers) was printed as a solid panel of the day-glo pink PANTONE ink. Turn one of those babies over on your desk and you'd certainly know that it was there.

The pink bar at the bottom of each design, in addition to providing a visual anchor, was primarily another brazen excuse for getting some more pink ink onto the page.

The point was to be eye-catching but we still wanted the logo and associated designs to make people smile a little bit. According to the client we certainly did that.

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