The Kentuckiana Association of Musicians and Singers (KAMS) is a 501c3 organization, located in New Albany, Indiana, that offers music lessons and opportunities to play as a group at no charge to the individual. They arrange group lessons, community concerts, and local meetups for musicians.
I previously worked with Owen Heritage, founder of KAMS, on a PSA video to raise awareness of the organization. The organization now is undergoing a rebranding process, and I volunteered to help them design a new website and update their branding with the assistance of my classmates from Purdue Polytechnic Institute in New Albany.
The goal is to make their branding more cohesive and representative of the organization. The digital presence of the company needs to convey that the organization is for musicians of all skill levels, seeking a way to work together in their community. The first change made was the name; revising the name to Community Music Alliance (CMA) allows for better understanding of that the organization offers and represents.
With the new name came a need for a corresponding logo. The stipulations for the new logo were as follows: it needed to match the current exterior building sign; it must appeal to a wide range of people as all ages are included in the organization; it should convey the purpose of the organization more clearly than the original logo.
Due to a limited amount of time, the logo design process started before the new name was officially chosen. To accommodate this, several unique concepts were drawn up in Adobe Illustrator before being narrowed down to the most effective.
It was determined that the first column best accomplished the previously mentioned conditions for a new logo. Several variations of this logo were made; variations included changes in alignment, text size, and color.
The logo selected by the Community Music Alliance board worked well on both black and white backgrounds. The arrangement of the shapes in the graphic simulated the movement of music and also highlighted the variety of musical instruments used in CMA functions, including voice.
