It's been a long time coming, but Trinity Western University has finally launched the new brand for their athletics department, the Spartans. The evolution of this new brand was a journey of literally tens of dozens of iterations and many different directions, culminating in this final version. By the time I joined IBC and was brought onto this project, much of the work had already been done by others before me, and I had been given a very definite direction to bring it home.

The wordmark had already long been established and approved, so one of the challenges was making sure that the icon worked well with it. Since an icon and a wordmark are usually developed in conjunction, this was a bit tricky. Basically the icon needed to have a slightly abstract quality to it while still representing a proud, noble Spartan. After viewing many months worth of work that had brought us to the point we were at, there were three sketches that had some of the necessary elements to make the icon successful. I think it's fairly obvious that the final icon was developed by taking the best elements of the three and making them work as one, as well as tie in seamlessly with the established wordmark.