IDENTITY / VISUAL DESIGN

2010-2021
MI-TAKA

Various Logo Projects

As a designer deeply to the core I love to express myself designing someone’s company logo. It’s an extensive process – from research and gathering a lot of information to synthesizing it into a symbol by simplifying it to its very limit just before dematerializes and turns into an unrecognisable shape. The birth of the perfect shape or contour is a very tiny work and here is where my natural curiosity helps me to observe surrounded world better and imagine it into symbols. It is the one that helps me also look deeply to the heart of a company, product or service, to understand in what they’re unique, their principles, and eventually to come up with the right idea. Sometimes, when the creation process is started all I have to do is to sketch a little with my pencil to discover the symbol that is lying just beneath the surface. But sometimes I have to dig deeper, making hundreds of variations on paper or the screen, to achieve the best result. Definitely a rewarding process.

4 Chairs

These are some of my projects for a start-up company “4 Chairs” with the main purpose to sell chairs – mostly office chairs.
Strange or not but the client wasn’t happy with my result and decided to make a competition for the logo and to set the task to а various designers. The final result was… well, I wouldn’t comment that just will mention that now the logo is a raw silhouette of an office chair closed in hexagon form. But that’s the client, not me! Maybe this work better for them, who knows! The client is always right, right? (;

Auto O

Auto O(riginal) is a side project of a major Bulgarian car part distribution company that distributes original (but not only) parts for most of the popular cars brands. I haven’t received any design directions from the client or what he wants or wish to represent the logo. I decided to make a few logotype projects with a very different graphic approach to achieve diversity. The client chose the one that suits him the most. 

BAALO

The private organisation BAALO have made competition for the creation of their new symbol because the old one wasn’t serving them well anymore as they grew through the years. They had a big list of wishes what should and what shouldn’t be their logotype. One thing I had to present for sure in my logo projects – the consolidation and unification of large areas of otherwise fragmented agricultural lands.

Colourful World

Colourful World or “Cveten sviat” in Bulgarian is an online boutique for flowers, bouquets and small gifts which goes with the flowers. They asked me to bring something simple, but fresh, with a character of a smile, to express the idea that the youth energy brings, as the owners were young enthusiastic entrepreneurs.

Daricars

Daricars is a company that distributes off-road car accessories of the Asian brand Carryboy. These accessories often are those that make your offroad vehicle looks like a beast both on or off the road. Some enthusiasts even believed their 4×4 could “fly” with those accessories and that they have “wings” to do everything with their machines… of course, figuratively speaking. The client’s favourite one was the DC-winged symbol but here I want to present not only it but all of the projects I’ve shown to the client.

Drug Store

Drug Store has a simple symbol solution for an online pharmacy with the same name. Clean, simple and very straight to the point logo. From those symbols that are laying right below the white surface of a paper sheet, just have to scratch it a little bit and it comes to the world.

Europack

Europack is one of those very few companies in the EU (surprise!) that supply certified bio sunflower seeds in the food industry and especially the bakery industry all across Europe and some other countries. Of course, the main symbol for their logomark must be a… cactus, right? (:

Genik

Genik is a company that has a chain for the distribution of coffee vending machines. I had these images in my head – can I incorporate a cup of coffee somehow in the logo and suddenly I realised that two cups could form the silhouette of the small letter “g”, the main letter of the company’s name. Then I’ve made some different variation of the cup but I found the best shape stylizing a coffee cup seeing from above.

Most people don’t realize that the aroma of coffee is one of the most important aspects of the pleasure to drink coffee so I decide to make the logo symbol “hot and smelly” by adding smoke coming out from the cup. This little red detail gives the sign more charm and style.

Green Way Association

For a few years, as a volunteer, I was part of a young and motivated team of Green Way Association, created with a simple purpose – to promote, develop and gives a push to the bicycle sport and young talents in Bulgaria. Association had a wide spectrum of operation such as managing sport (mainly bike) events & competitions on a national level, coach training, kids training, guided mountain bike tours and more… During my time there, along with my organisational duties I was the one responsible for all the visual communication and designs of the Association and all its sports events. I succeeded to rebrand Association’s visual identity and to create a Design Guidebook for all the accidental materials like signs, stamps, team shirts, vehicles, banners, winners podiums, etc., used later for various bike competitions.

Mayaeye

Maya Karkalicheva (mayaeye) is an inspiring person, a talented mountain photographer and a very special friend of mine with who I spent wonderful moments roaming the mountains. Once she asked me could I design her website and a simple, stylish logotype for her photography purposes. I was very happy to have a chance to build a home of so many wonderful mountain photos and I agreed without doubts. While I was designing the website the logotype came out itself. It didn’t come be an unique sign but it contains everything she wanted to have in her sign. Simple and well balanced as possible, readable and rounded reminding a camera lens.

Ogi BG

Ogi.bg is a website for car and motorbike tyres and rims. They asked me to make the design of their website as well as to redesign their logotype. The client had this idea to have a tyre incorporated in the letters, so I had a requirement I couldn’t run away from. Finally, I found a way to make some letters to be part of a car silhouette and the client embraced the idea. I’ve made many variations of a car silhouette until the client chose one that works for him.

R.Chizhova

Here I can be much more verbose but I will just share that this logotype I’ve made for a woman, a very talented artist who had a special place in my heart for a certain period of my life. I’ve made this logotype as a gift for one of her first solo exhibitions. I wanted to be something calligraphic that tells the story of her fragile artistic soul, something romantic as she is, something that reflects what she is through my eyes.
The letters are based on typeface Avalon Medium, but I’ve made some big changes to most of the letter’s lashes and especially to the capital letters of the logotype. I’ve made two different versions – Bulgarian and English, each of them with two variations of the position of her names, first or second heading position. I think the final result became well balanced, artistic and beautiful logotype.

U Right

U right is (or was) a website where you can seek your rights and receive online advice from a lawyer on how to proceed in various cases where your rights were violated such as cancelled flights, stopped electricity, etc.
Eventually, I came up with an unusual idea to drag the word “right” to U, designing it as a symbolic act of how your rights must stick all the time with you. You are magnetic of your rights.

Valival Digital Agency

Valival is the company I work the most with over the years. I’m their art director and senior designer. Once the company had a different name and for some law reasons, we had to change its name. As a creative mind responsible for the visual part of the things in the company it was natural to design the new logo of the company, but that wasn’t an easy job. All the colleagues’ eyes are upon you now. I’ve passed through many different variations of the logo when an idea came up to me that we are a company that powers up other companies’ online business. So why not we could be recognizable as a bringer of their future with a spacecraft – the symbol of innovations, а new territory discoverers, the vanguard design team of online software products. The true future-bringers.

I think it suits us very well.

Various Logos

Here are a bunch of design projects I’ve made through the years. Some of them are still alive, others left from competitions or are just unrealized projects but still worth to be shown off. I hope to enjoy them and don’t take them too seriously… 

Video Jogos

Videojogos (from Portuguese – Video Games) was an art & science conference for video games held in Lisbon Technical University during the period when I was studying in Lisbon for my master degree in Communication Design and New Media. Packman is an iconic and most recognized, played and enjoyed game by gamers of all time and the dice is another well-known attribute for analogue gaming. I decided to create a fusion between a popular game in Portugal with these unusual dices (analogue) with Packman (electronic) symbols to give more deep symbolic meaning and ways of vast personal interpretation for every participant in the conference – from artists to programmers, engineers and mad scientists there. For short time the black-yellow symbol with packmen became popular and very recognizable during the time of the conference among other posters covered many city walls and in my opinion, most of the participants in the conference were enjoyed wearing their black t-shirts with the symbol on them.

© 2024 Dimitar Nikolov. All Rights Reserved! Design: Dimitar Nikolov   Coding: Polina Soboleva