Duck Soup Design (ducksoup.design)

Overview

Duck Soup Design (ducksoup.design) is a personal branding project – and a work-in-progress – which began with the building of a CMS (stands for Content Management System and is basically a way of managing files and components) for automating a few web projects I was working on. I was looking for a unique name for the CMS that conveyed "ease", and "Duck soup" is the name I settled on. It was made popular by the Marx Brothers in 1933, but has been around since the early 1900s, and means something is easy to do or accomplish.

"Fixing the car will be duck soup for anyone with the right tools."

I've since expanded Duck Soup Design to become a label to encompass design tools, scripts and fonts with that same offering of "ease".

Below is the original logo I designed. It was clever, I thought, with lots of subtly hidden meaning to it. Other designers liked it too. But when I evaluated the brand's values I realised it needed a redesign. With some of the top values being "playful, friendly, relaxed, clever" it was clear that it didn't match those ideas through visual language. The logo seemed oriental and exclusive, and maybe better suited to a restaurant.

A Change of Direction

Line illustrations, like those in the early design and sketches can come across as friendly and playful. I found, instead, that the latter designs with big simple shapes with blocks of colours fitted the values of "playful, friendly, relaxed and clever" far better. I detail below some of the visual language choices made in designing the logo as it now is.