Ian James Andersen

Eye Candy Optics

Make your eyes look sweet as candy.

Rebranding of Eye Candy Optics, a trendy eyewear shop in downtown Chicago. The identity marks for Eye Candy Optics are based on the same pun the store uses focusing on the "sweet" nature of the eyewear they carry. I focused on making the various marks both charmingly sweet while also elegant to match the qualties valued by Eye Candy Optics’ owners and employees.

Client

Eye Candy Optics (school project).

Outcome

Logotype, Identity Mark, and Stationery

Identity Mark Variations

Stationery

Identity System

Eye Candy Optics is an upscale eyewear shop in Chicago's Wicker Park area, they specialize in hip and fashionable glasses and friendly professional care.

Concept

For Eye Candy Optics I wanted to use the the fun implications of the pun name in a way that focused on fashion. The identity marks needed to find a balance between the playfulness of candy and the sophistication of well designed eyewear.

Approach

The pun in the name was the starting point, I started with sketches finding ways to combine eyes, glasses and candy.

Lettermark

The lettermark links the lowercase initials of Eye Candy in a representation of a pair of glasses which are decorated with candycane-like striping. In order to maintain the focus on fashion I reduced the striping as much as possible while ensuring that the mark could still hold together when set in black and white.

Identity Marks

I created two identity marks which focus more on the hip nature of the shop, these marks are more in keeping with the ecclectic nature of the community where the shop is located. The first mark plays on the idea of glasses as a wrapper for eyes, transforming the wingtips of the frames into the ends of a twisted candy wrapper. The lenses of the glases are replaced with a candy swirl, reinforcing the connection between the glasses and candy in a semi-hypnotizing way that shows the fun and friendly atmosphere of the establishment. The second identity mark is more enigmatic, a gumball machine filled with eyeballs is a little bit creepy but fun. I felt this mark could be expanded as part of a system using a set of intriguing marks combined with an equally playful typographic system into an appealing identity system.

Stationery

The stationery system was created using the lettermark because it seemed the most in keeping with how the store seemed to be portraying itself from the research I could gather. The striping from the mark is repeated as a rule dividing the space of the letterhead, business card and envelope. The typography is designed to match with the logotype that I designed to lock-up with the lettermark.

The initial thumbnails were created to explore the widest resonable variations in order to have multiple places to start and begin to decide what direction was best for the brand

After selecting the three most successful options, I continued to finese the details of the marks and explore different options for creating them. Ultimately two were chosen to be used, the eyeball candy wrapper didn't seem to hit the fashion mark, instead coming across as too child-like.

The lettermark followed the same process as the identity mark, finding the widest possible ways and then narrowing down to the most successful and determining the details like the exact spacing of the candy stripes.