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Late last year I completed a nice identity project for Volta, a Canadian-based visual development studio (which means they create concept art and IP for the games and entertainment industries).
A relatively young company, Volta already boasts an impressive client list and is doing some amazing work for the games industry, all they lacked was a coherent company identity. And that’s where I came in.

I was contacted by Volta’s executive producer and CEO to discuss the project. They had been following my work for a few years (especially the work I’ve been doing with Mam Tor and for Ashley Wood), and wanted me to help them find their voice. They had a few keywords and points that needed to be ticked, but it became clear from the start that we were all on the same wavelength concerning the look of the logo. In addition I was also asked to design a range of business cards for the core team at Volta.

The first thing that struck me looking at the name — Volta — was the “Volt” part, which implied electricity, which implies power, energy and dynamics. Incidentally, the inventor of the electric battery is called Alessandro Volta. Looked like I was going in the right direction!

First round of designs

With my initial designs I went for a very robust custom type design. I wasn’t sure yet about upper or lowercase letters, and tried a mix of both, and added thick slabs on the V and A. In general I liked the design of the letters but it was far from perfect, and the negative space between the letters didn’t work well.

Second round of designs

As an alternative option, I designed a very blocked, square logo mark, much more constructivist in nature, with some subtle hints towards gaming. Everyone agreed that this approach was too blunt. We all preferred the first designs, so I went back and started fine tuning those.

My Fed-Ex moment

Still looking for a visual hook in the logo — I was hoping to somehow add a symbol or shape akin to lightning or electricity — I hit my “FedEx” moment (for those who don’t know what I mean by that, take a really good look at that logo). By setting the L and T closer together and switching the angle on the foot of the L, the negative space created a simplified lightning bolt. Exactly what I was looking for!
Now that I had my visual hook, it was a matter of balancing out the rest of the word mark: I turned the slabs of the V and A in on themselves, in the process creating the bridge in the A and flipped over (for the V) it created a nice reversed slab.

The final Volta word mark and the iconic mark

Additionally I designed a logo ligature, by combining the V and A, creating a logo icon that Volta can use to support the main mark. A nice bonus is that the VA mark is also turns out to be an ambigram.

Now that the logo was designed (and approved, of course), I could start on the second part of the project: the business cards. Volta had sent me a selection of their artwork at the start of the project to give me an overview of what they do, and that had given me an idea for their identity.

Concept painting for Criminal (Midway Games). Image © Volta Creations.

To create the identity, I felt that — especially for a creative company — that it was important that it somehow showed their actual work. For the cards then, I thought, it could be nice to use isolated elements from their digital paintings, creating a set of art card, each different and showing different styles and moods: soft, hard, warm, cold, techno, organic, etc,…

Initial tests to see how masking out the textures might work

One thing however, was that Volta work almost exclusively in low resolution, so the chances of getting print-resolution artwork was pretty much out of the question. But that actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise. By being forced to “blow up” the artwork (I only wanted to show details) the images became slightly fuzzy and you could clearly make out the pixels. This reinforced the whole screen-based work flow of the company, and added an extra texture to the already rough brush strokes — although I had to convince the printer that it was indeed the desired look and not an oversight!

Detail of a card

For the card design I applied the VA symbol to the art side, knocked out in white, with the full logo at the same position on the back in black. The design of the back is set in 3 weights of Univers: 67 Bold Condensed, 57 Condensed, and 47 Condensed Light — creating a rigid system to display contact information that doesn’t overpower the logo.

The finished cards