The Product

Clay Ranch Brand Identity, logo and brand development, 2019
This particular project was actually one part of another, larger project. For my work in the Expose Grad Show exhibition for the Visual Communications program at Medicine Hat College, I decided to carry out a re-branding project for my family's Manitoba quarter horse business, Clay Ranch Quarter Horses.

Carrying out such an undertaking was a perfect way to pair my passions for western culture and modern design.

The special challenge with this re-branding project was that over the years since my parents began their horse business in 1992, they have adopted a few different names or phrases that are considered specifically as identifying with their 'brand.' A couple of these (equally important) identifiers were: Clay Ranch and DC Horses.

The issue that I needed to address, here, was in unifying these independent phrases so that they could be seen and interpreted together, visually. This would help to address some confusion that my parents had been having in recent years, regarding the name of their business.

As a starting point, I decided to create a logo of sorts from the initials in the DC Horses phrase. This would be incorporated as a livestock freeze brand placed on the shoulder of particular horses at Clay Ranch, since my parents have been wanting a brand to visually identify their stock for quite some time now.

From there, I worked to develop a wordmark that would incorporate the stock brand I had developed, in its entirety. The solution I came to reads first as Clay Ranch, which was the intention, while upon further inspection, the DC brand is recognized within the composition. In the creation of these items, I used Scala Sans and Scala Pro which have since been adopted as official typefaces in the brand identity of Clay Ranch Quarter Horses. A modified version of Scala Pro provides a solid, traditional and dependable feeling for the Clay Ranch name, while Scala Sans is used for the DC characters, setting them apart, indicating modernity and being a simplified form that is most easily implemented as a stock brand. The singular custom serif, or 'spur,' present on the 'D' character not only helps to balance the letterform for use in the wordmark, but also serves as a visual identifier and an abstract visual reference for the brand identity.

These items were incorporated on various materials for my final Grad Show project, including a stationery set, business cards, a wooden sign and a printed look book.