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admin | October 1, 2010

A Tour through 15 years of Regenerate branding

Regenerate’s branding has evolved and grown a lot over the years, and it has taken from 2003 to 2018 for us to finally get it right.

Splashlogo (2003)

Before we adopted the phoenix, regenerate just had this sort of swirl and splash. It wasn’t great, and didn’t last long. Going into this we had no one on the team with any photoshop experience, and it was a long journey to success. This logo lasted us a few months, until Phil Wilshaw got some time over summer to create something better.


Pigeon Phoenix (2003-2005)

The Phoenix came to be the symbol of regenerate, but at first, it was not well realized, looking like a fat pigeon. Once we had a recognisable logo, we took every opportunity to make it look different in each poster – frankly not such a great idea, but it was fun to design them. Each week the DJ booth had another A0 banner (printing was cheap back then!) over it, so you see a lot of specials below. In theory at this point our corporate colours were charcoal and fire orange, but we rarely stuck to them. We went through several fonts during this period, including trying to make our own, which did not go well.


Distressed Phoenix (2005-2007)

Grunging up your branding was very much on trend in 2005, so we followed suit. We found the font dirty ego, and used it to rework all our branding. Initially we pivoted to black and dark red colours, still mixed in with photos, before House Party forced us to simplify. We needed an eye-catching design, with minimal colours to make it cheap to print. We settled on black distressed colours on a yellow background – this allowed us to photocopy cheaply onto bright yellow paper, and meant we could print about 500 a4 flyers for next to nothing. The design stuck around, and eventually the orange came back in. Our colours at this point were #000000 (black), #FFFF00 (bright yellow) #FF9900 (warm orange).


Techno Phoenix (2007-2018)

In summer 2007 it became apparent that the grungy distressed look was over, and we would need to update. We refreshed the logo and came up with the “Diamond Phoenix / “Techno Phoenix” / “Future Phoenix” as it has variously been referred to. Looking back, it’s a bit over simple, and the circles on the left are oddly pointless, but we’ve stuck with it. When the design first emerged DOminik and Phil went through various stages of trying it against all sorts of colours and backgrounds, trying to decide what would look best for album art, posters and more. Our gigalum posters, one of the few things not designed by Phil Wilshaw, but by Dominik Mori has a very cool and exciting feel. In parallel to this, we also explored stripped back options for the podcast and the Phoenix 6 logo. We went through numerous fonts again, not finding one that would settle. We did manage to settle on 4 stripes however.


Future Phoenix (2018-Present)

A renewed push on the podcast meant more branding needed, and this time there was a distinct effort to distill the last 15 years into a simplified, bold brand. We’ve kept the core colours of #000000 (black), #FFFF00 (bright yellow) #FF9900 (warm orange) and added white (#FFFFFF). The colours are strong, and required a bold text to complement them. After trying Grafik, we settled on Arial Bold in all caps – it doesn’t come much more bold and simple.


Other Bits

On two occasions we’ve flirted briefly with abandoning the Phoenix – in 2017 for the Ibiza cover art, and in 2006 for our foray into funky house – although this one was supposed to be a Phoenix personified as a sort of hed kandi dancer.

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