Logo and Element Design

This is the existing Malmo House logo. It is in low resolution but depicts a house in a chalk like texture. 
I designed this logo because I am influenced by Swedish design, hence the name Malmo House. I designed this logo after being inspired by the designs of Simogo for the Swedish iOS game Year Walk. 
The game is a rich, aesthetic-led designed game that uses sketchy techniques to create a dark and wintery tone. I adopted this when developing the Malmo House original logo, but after my design was created and used in thumbnails on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter I noticed that it was a complicated logo to read and often degraded in resolution. I felt it was important to retain the name of Malmo House in the logo as we are a new-build company and the most important thing for us at the moment is getting our name out into the competitive marketplace. 

House design within Year Walk, the blacks, whites and grey colours
that I adopted were directly influenced by Year Walk's colour scheme.

Character design within Year Walk. I adopted the textures and
gradients used in this image for the Malmo House original logo.

It was after this discovery that I again turned to Year Walk. Simogo create iOS and mobile platform interactive media, so they must come across thumbnails in their product development. The logo design for Year Walk is a lot more minimalist, clear and flat than the design of the game - this was an important step to make sure it looked professional on the small thumbnail of an iOS icon. I also looked at the very minimalist approach of Simogo's own logo - this time incorporating text into a loosely based circle element. I feel circles are very fashionable at the moment, being a simple shape and effective device in contemporary flat design. 

The logos for Simogo and Year Walk.

So after researching existing logos I created this first draft of a flat design Malmo House logo.

I liked the circle and right aligned text, I chose the font Open Sans as it is a clear and sans serif text so will look better when scaled down. I also adopted Simogo's black and white colour scheme, however I chose a dark grey instead of a black as it went well with the sand colour that Malmo House use. In this development, the two layers of text are the same pixel size, I think it makes the logo look disjointed and lopsided so, with the next alteration I decided to exploit more of the empty space within the circle.

By making the "House" layer larger I feel the logo looks more balanced and the right amount of space is created and used within the circle. I chose to include the asterisk to add a small amount of aesthetic within the logo, hopefully this can also develop into a motif, allowing us to simplify the logo even further.