TESCO

At the time of this project TESCO was poised to overtake its main rivals to become the biggest supermarket in the UK.
This rapid growth may have been responsible for the lack of cohesion that showed in the visual audit of the brand with up to 12 variations of the logo in active circulation.

A key objective was to evaluate what elements of the brand mark were perceived as valuable and what could be discarded to enable the design to evolve.
Unwittingly the use of a blue 'butchers stripe' in advertising had become synonymous with the brand and could not be discarded. The bars however seemed crude and ways were explored to integrate them into a more cohesive word mark

The best arrangement seemed to combine the blue bars into a sculpted underline beneath a revised version of the logotype. This logotype replaced slab serifs with more refined wordmark loosely based on typefaces like Optima which have the weight of a sans serif but retain some classical proportions.

A crucial objective was to define a way of writing and 'locking-up' sub-brands so that they could be signed in a more cohesive way on buildings. This also provided a clear strategy for how to write new offers in the future.

A more informal italic was chosen to write these in contrast to the main logo.

The new arrangement of the logo emphasised the use of white as a formal corporate colour and preferred background, however this was misconstrued in some early applications with the placement of the logo in a white panel on vehicles rather than reversing a logo in a suitable tint on a coloured background.

The colour guidelines were later applied rigidly on fascias with the expansion of the Express convenience stores. This unsympathetic over use of white led to a revision sometime from 2005 when it was placed on a black background.