As you may have noticed, there have been some changes to the design of ChefSteps.com. We have a new brand accent color, a new typeface, and a new homepage. But the tried-and-true ChefSteps logo has remained the same. Today we begin a roll-out of not a new logo, but the old with a fresh coat of paint.
The design team spent many weeks (and some nights) exploring what a new logo for ChefSteps would look like. We had many many iterations, some good, some laughable. I began to take on a somewhat feral appearance, hunched over printouts of logo designs making notes and muttering to myself. At the end of the day, we ended right back where we started. Most good journeys do take you home at the end of the day. And, if you’re like us, you realize just how good home is.
We’re proud to present this modest logo, which you’ll soon be seeing wherever you find ChefSteps on the web. If you happen to walk past our studio in Pike Place Market, please forgive us for continuing to bear the classic logo on our door. But stay tuned, new fun things are coming.
You will notice immediately that our rectangular logo mark has changed. The inspiration for the original mark are the windows in our Pike Place Market studio, from which we can see ships passing in Elliott Bay, and on a clear day the jagged peaks of the Olympic Mountains. For the updated mark, each rectangle is now sized at a 4:3 ratio, a nod to the classic aspect ratio of film and photography. The mark as a whole, incidentally, fits comfortably into a 16:9 aspect ratio, the modern format all our video and photography is shot in. All together, the mark remains an allusion to the frame, whether it holds an image of a soufflé, or a vista of the Pacific Northwest.
More space between the rectangles helps the mark hold up better at smaller sizes while emphasizing the negative space between each at full size. And of course, we are using our new brand accent color, Pantone 172u.
For the word mark, gone forever are the dueling font weights. We think presenting the name in a single weight is a nice simplification. Gone now as well is the final trace of Gotham, replaced by our now-standard Circular with some custom kerning between the letters. We have a softer black for the word mark that is complimentary to our accent orange. We hope you like it.
