Socom

Category: Visual ID, Branding, Logo Design

Socom is the Center of Expertise of Social Services of south-west Finland. Their goal is to maintain a strong community of social work, education and research which works within all sectors, from private to public. Socoms goals are to represent professionality, innovation, know-how, maintaining the community and being a strong link between influencers.

Socom contacted OH! Graphics as they planned a renewal and refurbish of their Visual Identity for their 15th anniversary. Especially the original version of Socoms logo was feeling outdated, being designed back in 2001. Socom was asking OH! Graphics to create a visual identity which has a modern, fresh but timeless appearance. Their hope was to preserve the key characteristics of the old visual identity and take inspiration from the previous logo and its color scheme.

Old logo

New logo

The old version of the logo was designed in 2001 by Velipekka Ryttyläinen. The former design was taken strongly into consideration as it was OH! Graphics was keen to maintaining some of its features. To refurbish an old design or to respect former key characteristics can help a brands recognition, while a completely new design can sometimes create confusion about a brands identity.

For the new logo a more modern san-serif-typeface was chosen. With its geometric shapes it refreshes the feel of the logo compared to its more formal serif-typeface predecessor. The colours blue and purple were adopted but, additional, more vibrant colours were included into the design. Those vibrant colours spice up the colour-scheme but are used only in the graphical element of the logo.

Graphical element

The vibrant colours and their use in the graphical element are symbolic. It is a swung, blue coloured shape which shelters similar shapes inside it. The blue colour of the “framing” shape is taken from the logo typeface while the vibrant colours are distributed between the shapes inside. This connects the framing shape directly to Socom while the vibrant coloured shapes inside are a symbolism for the diversity of social needs which Socom interacts with.

Stationery design & brand manual.