Snowboarder City

This project is the side project of a snowboarder/blogger who lives in Paris, France, and who wants to launch a blog and a YouTube channel.

The blog will offer tips and tricks to snowboarders living far from the mountains. This leads to a unique perspective regarding travel tips, buying tips and so on. Indeed, it can be hard for example to find and buy gear when you’re not on-site with the outside snow and mountain-specific weather conditions to help you choose the right product.

Creative brief

The future blog and YouTube channel needed a name first. One that evokes the contrast between snowboarding and city life. There was no doubt about using the word “city”. Of course, the word “snowboard” or a derivative was also essential to reflect the idea behind the project and to get decent SEO results.

This is where a great deal of research was necessary regarding existing websites, channel names and social handles. The perfect combination between city life and snowboarding activity finally came out as “Snowboarder City”. To avoid losing the name, the domain name was bought shortly after.

For the logo, the desire was to illustrate once again that contrast: all snowboarders don’t necessarily live all year round in the mountains. One can love occasional snowboarding but still live most of the time in a city.

Design options & choices

The idea was to create an icon as strong as the contrast proposed in the name. To do so, 2 elements were necessary: one that would represent the mountains and the other one the city.

After exploring other leads, stylized mountains proved to be a good choice for the mountains. And since Paris is the city of reference, the Eiffel tower was chosen to represent the city.

Among all the sketching, the idea of the Eiffel tower curved in a C-shape was working.

Having found the core icon, it was time to work on the name itself. Obviously, the word “Snowboarder” would reflect the slopes and curves that a snowboarder leaves on the snow and “City” would reflect the straightness of buildings. This is why the “Noteworthy” and “Arial Black” typefaces were adopted for the words “Snowboarder” and “City” respectively. And since snowboard was the core subject of the blog, writing the word “city” upside down made sense. Plus, capital letters and the chosen typeface help to make it completely legible.

Refinement

The client chose the 4th icon concept for its originality and the 1st name concept for its legibility.

To emphasize the c contrast in the name, the characters spelling “Snowboarder” is now regular instead of bold. Also, only the “Snow” part is coloured in a bright blue, the same as the one used for the icon mountains.

Now that the brand identity has been defined, it is time to design the website as well as the YouTube account. A draft has already been made for the YouTube channel art. Soon, I should be capable to update this page with the channel art since I already made a draft.