Logo Design for Equine Osteopathy Provider

Logo Design for Equine Osteopathy Provider 848 310 Nick Saporito

GHOST Equine is an osteopathy provider focused on providing general maintenance, relaxation and conditioning for companion and sports horses recovering from injury.

horse1

The desired effect of the logo was something that communicated calm, relaxing, professional and trustworthy.

The tricky part of this project lied in the name — GHOST — which isn’t meant to mean an actual ghost in any sense. The name is derived in two parts: part one being the owner’s initials (G and H,) and part two, “ost”, being an abbreviation of osteopathy. Put the two together and you get Ghost.

So, the first challenge here was to develop a wordmark for the brand that didn’t read as “ghost” upon first sight and would instead read as “GH osteopathy”, but without so much separation between the two parts that it would disrupt the overall balance of the design. We wanted to design something that would be immediately apparent to a first-time viewer that this was indeed an osteopathy service, but at the same time would read as a single unit.

Determining an Approach

Separating the individual parts of the name with differing colors sounds like it might work in theory, but it doesn’t. When the logo needs to be refined to monotone, it would immediately read as “ghost”…

gh1

Using bold, non-bold, uppercase/lowercase, italics, etc. variations of the same font could possibly work, but in my opinion it still reads as “GHOST” upon first sight, so I decided not to go this route.

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So the obvious solution here was to use two different fonts, but not fonts with too much disparity, otherwise it would throw off the balance of the entire design.

gh3

After browsing through a wide variety of fonts, I finally came across two that I felt complemented each other in striking a nice balance between differentiating and unifying them at the same time. I also used two different colors to aid in emphasizing the two-part meaning behind the name.

gh4

Since there was already a lot of information being communicated in just that part of the name alone, I decided to make “Ghost” the main focus of the wordmark and sprawl out “EQUINE” beneath the name as a secondary element, otherwise it would just look cluttered and awkward.

On to The Icon

Now that the wordmark was out of the way, it was time to move on to creating some kind of conceptual design that communicated some level of osteopic support for horses, but in a relaxing way. I decided that the best approach would be a line art style drawing of a horse’s head, while including some kind of element that implies osteopathy in some way.

My first attempt was to design the horse so that it looked like it was in a standard rehabilitation exercise, as depicted below…

gh5

For some reason, I didn’t like it. It didn’t look right and I can’t exactly put my finger on why. Maybe it was poor execution on my part, maybe it was because we’re not used to seeing a horse in this position, so the mind automatically thinks “something isn’t right here,” or maybe it was a little of both.

I eventually decided to try out using circles of varying sizes and in a path along the horse’s neck so that it would suggest being the spine of the horse, and I think that ended up being the best option. I immediately liked how it looked…

equineosteopathlogo1

Pair it with the wordmark and we have a winner…

equineosteopathlogo2

Equine Osteopath Logo – click to enlarge

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Nick Saporito

Hi, I'm Nick— a Philadelphia-based graphic designer with over 10 years of experience. Each year millions of users learn how to use design software to express their creativity using my tutorials here and on YouTube.

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8 comments
  • Thiago Abreu

    Hey, Nick. I liked this job but I think you’d use a different way to choose the fonts.

    In my opinion (and that’s only what I’m thinking) G looks like a font, the H another and the OST a third font. I understood you had a difficult to take a difference between then but I felt there wasn’t harmony in these. The solution is excellent but as I told it looks like 3 different font and not two.

    I loved the icon and how you used a concept you teach in that Line Art Logo tutorial in your channel. If they want to use only this, it has an excellent mean. Loved.

    Congratulations, Nick. Your jobs are amazing and I’ll never be tired to tell it for you. Creative and professional. Success in your career and thanks for your help in every question I have.

    • Nick Saporito

      Thanks for the feedback, Thiago. I have to respectfully disagree about the font choice. The G and H look like they’re in the same family to me — the designer of that font did an excellent job. It’s one of my favorite fonts. I guess it’s open to interpretation though, and it’s always good to hear someone else’s perspective. Thanks for the feedback and your support.

  • Maga

    Thanks for sharing your design thoughts. Great design. I think the problem with the first design is the yellow line going up – maybe if it was more horizontal it would have worked. I’m new to your work and your blog. Thanks too for your YouTube videos on Inkscape. Off to read some more

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