Sogma Productions rebranding
Jonathan “Sogma” Diaz and I go way back. Our professional relationship started back in 2011 when we both worked for the music label JDX Music. Sogma was signed as a musician and I was volunteering my time as a graphic designer and front end developer. This was during my junior year of college and while I was going to school for digital media arts; I had no formal training in front end web development.
After JDX Music folded, Sogma created his own music production company, Sogma Productions, and asked me to help as his exclusive designer and all around tech guru. We collaborated over Skype for months and created a unique brand and launched a website to showcase the company’s work. Since then I have helped with pretty much any graphical work related to the Sogma brand.
Seeing that it had been nearly 8 years since we originally designed the Sogma brand and website we felt it was time for a new look. I have in the past 8 years greatly improved both my design and front end web development skills and was looking forward to the new challenge.
The plan
First things first, we had to figure out a plan and set some goals.
- We decided to time the re-branding and launch of the new website with the release of RISE, his EP release with one track in collaboration with Noisecontrollers – a famous musician within the same musical scene.
- Sogma had two identities (Sogma the DJ & Sogma Productions the music production company) both with unique logos and it confused a lot of people…including us! 😜 We decided to use 1 logo that could work in either situation.
- The old Sogma branding was black and white. Sogma knew he wanted to introduce color this time around but didn’t want to be locked into one color for another 8 years. We decided to design the logo and website in a way where we could change the accent color with every new album release.
- Sogma specifically requested the new logo have a “super hero vibe”. 🦸♂️
- Since I maintain the website, I wanted something that was easier and faster than WordPress.
- In the best interest of the client I also encouraged we ditch his previous host & use Netlify to cut costs.
The outcome
Logo
We started with the logo first. After a few weeks of on-off work, we had a new design sketched and I started creating it in Adobe Illustrator. Unfortunately, about halfway through designing the logo we discovered by pure chance DJ Blasco had a strikingly similar logo. 🤦♂️ Back to the drawing board.
So we started over from scratch. Another couple of weeks go by of on-off again work and we had another new design sketched out. In the end, the redesigned logo was a blessing in disguise as the client felt it gave off more of a super hero vibe better than the first design.
Sogma released a video using the new logo to tease his new EP release and give everyone a taste of the new branding. Note that the video was not created by me.
Website
Since I do all the website maintenance and up keep, it was mostly my call as to what technology we would use. I was already experienced with Jekyll: a flexible static site generator that is built upon Ruby. I use Jekyll on a daily basis at Bentley Systems and was planning on redoing my personal site with it as well. The website is saved in a GitHub repo and is automatically built and deployed by Netlify.
Due to the tight time schedule, rather than spending time building and debugging a new layout, we decided to build the site upon the Wrap premium Jekyll theme created by Andy Lu. We then modified the theme to meet our needs. Some parts had to be re-written due to newer, better technologies becoming available while other parts were re-written because we thought we could do better. 😏
Testimonials
Thank you so much for all your hard work.. The website kicks ass!! 😃
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