CKUT 90.3 is Montréal’s most-listened to (and best loved) community radio station. Since I first moved to the city 15 years ago, I’ve been an avid fan of their progressive and diverse programming, so I was really happy to get the chance to work with them on the redesign of their upcoming website.

As I embarked on the project, it quickly became evident that I would need to rework CKUT’s logo. Like many grassroots organisations, professional design standards were difficult for them to maintain, and the identity system lacked consistency both conceptually and practically. Many different iterations and distortions of the logo were being used, and a vector master file did not even exist!

I thought it might be enlightening to break down the redesign of the logo and my thinking behind it.

The previous design had a lot of equity within the community, and I didn’t want to mess with that. So, in redrawing the mark, my main goal was to simply clean it up and create a stronger overall bouma shape.

In large sizes, the previous design’s inconsistencies really stuck out, and at smaller sizes (where it is frequently used as a sponsor of events around town) the unevenness of the stroke weights made it unbalanced (left to right, light to dark) and unwieldy to use, not to mention the legibility problems of the supporting text/tagline. Starting from scratch, I evened the stroke weights and drew the letterforms slightly bolder and tighter to increase the logo’s visual weight at small sizes and to activate the negative space between the characters.

The circled “c” proved to be quite a challenge to get just right, with a lot of tweaking necessary to make its weight fit with the rest of the letterforms. Tightening the kerning was also a precision job to get it close enough as to not feel like it was falling off the edge of the logo, but maintaing balanced spacing with the rest of the letters.

The most controversial change of course, was the “k”. The original “k” was likened to a spark, or, in my mind, a person raising their fist in defiance, and it clearly symbolised CKUT’s uniqueness (and non-conformity) as a community-based radio station. As much as I really liked the idea of it, the amateur drawing with its strange bulges, angles and tapers, really cheapened the logo. The new “k” keeps the spirit of the spark, but makes it clearly legible as a letter and unifies it with the rest of the logo.

The final touch was adding the frequency id and the Montréal tagline using a single weight of Interstate. The larger type-size and lockup clarifies the information while maintaining the visual balance of the logo.

In redesigning CKUT’s logo, I tried to strike a balance by bringing the disparate elements of the previous logo together into a cohesive whole, while maintaing the spirit of the individual letters. It could be read as a nice metaphor for what community radio does, bringing diverse peoples together and amplifying their collective voice.

The new website is on its way and will be a great opportunity to see the new logo live in context.