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 Prairie
Public Art Director Les Skoropat on developing Prairie Public's new
image
Q.: What were you asked
to do?
I was asked to develop a new logo. It was one of the first directives
Kathleen (former Prairie Public President Kathleen
Pavelko) made when she came here.
Q. What was the process you went through to develop the new image?
We put together a committee of community members which included people
who worked in the media that had television experience and marketing
experience. We told them that we were in the process of coming up with
a new logo. What we were after was not so much ideas for a new logo,
but how Prairie Public was perceived in the community and how we could
present that image to the community. The committee related detailed
information as to how the public perceived the staff and the service,
how they saw us as an institution, as well as how they saw some of the
programs, such as Sesame Street.
Q. What were you hearing?
We heard a lot. We heard everything from the fact that they hated
pledge drives, to comments that they respected the services we provided.
Telling us they hated pledge drives wasn't helpful because we already
knew about that, but they gave us a list of attributes they wanted us
to be: responsible, respectable; a whole list of things we wanted to
work with when we thought of the image. We told them it was not possible
to put all of these things into a logo, but it gave us some direction
and a basis for starting to work with an image.
Q. What happened next?
I went to work on the design. The marketing department discussed the
various ideas we came up with in the committee and we distilled them
into something I could work with, in visual terms.
I asked Kathleen for an outline of the structure of the corporation.
I needed to know how the different divisions fit in the overall corporation.
We had Prairie Online. We had Prairie School Television. I asked whether
we were looking for separate images for all of these different ventures.
Q. And they decided to go with one logo?
Yes. Knowing that, I designed a symbol that would represent the whole
corporation rather than separate identities for each of the divisions
or enterprises. It was decided on a corporate level that North Dakota
Public Radio would have its own identity.
Q. What thought process did you go through to design the logo?
I leaned heavily on the basics of logo design. A logo design is something
that needs to be simple, direct, appropriate. For example, say you're
doing a logo for a fence company; you wouldn't want something that looks
inappropriate for that particular company. Imagine you designed a logo
in the shape of a water droplet; that wouldn't relate to fences. For
our company, I wanted to design a logo that would be appropriate for
the kind of company we are.
It should be bold, distinctive and unique. It shouldn't look like someone
else's logo— that would be confusing.
If it were a very good solution, it would be timeless and contemporary.
In terms of its application, it should work well in different sizes
and formats.
Q. How did you know a logo should be all of these things?
One learns these things as a design student (and then one forgets these
rules). You do some "bad" logos and you think about why it
doesn't work, and realize you're breaking some of those basic rules.
I also did some research to see what kinds of logos existed for other
public broadcasting stations, how they approached a similar problem.
Those that were most helpful were the television and radio networks
that weren't identified by call letters or a channel number, but had
a name, such as "Oregon Public Broadcasting," because those
stations couldn't rely on the channel number or call letters as logo
elements. There are some nice logos out there, and some that break the
basic rules and don't work as well as they could.
Q. What did those logos tell you about what you wanted to do?
That was more for telling me what not to do. They were already in use.
I wouldn't develop one like Oregon Public Broadcasting because people
might be confused as to who was who.
I investigated the approaches the logo could take. This refers to how
the company is represented. Should it be an "umbrella" logo?
Should each division should it have its own logo? I did a number of
options like that. It was important that we decided how we wanted to
be perceived and then choose a direction.
Then I went about thinking about how to synthesize all of the things
we had done with the committee and the information Kathleen had given
me on which direction to take.
Q. How do you turn that into a logo?
That's where the skill and experience and art of design comes in. That's
kind of like asking a composer, "how do you make music?" He
might say, "I learn about tone and scales and then I just make
music." You would probably get as many answers as you have composers.
Some of it can't be quantified. You can approach it from a structured
setting, and that was a lot of what we did when we were trying to define
how the corporation is perceived and how we wanted it to be perceived.
When you present a logo you are presenting yourself. When you put it
on a letterhead, a van, the side of a building, you are presenting yourself
to the public. You're saying, "This is my company. This is my name."
In some ways it's a visual shorthand, because you can't convey everything
you want to say about your company in one simple mark.
I start sketching, and I had a lot of ideas that I could turn into visual
concepts. The image that seemed to work the best with the concepts we
talked about was the image of a spiral, which I also combined with portions
of circles and ellipses.
Q. What's an ellipse?
An ellipse is an oval.
Q. What were you thinking about when you were drawing?
I tried to keep in mind all of the things that we discussed that had
to go into the logo design.
Q. Did you want it to look like a 90's thing?
We wanted it to look contemporary and classic at the same time.
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