School of Art is an association which purpose is the promotion of arts in the round; it was born in October 2010 by investing energy in four areas: dance, music, visual arts and theater.

The guideline for developing this logo was simple, though perhaps a bit vague:

• there are four macro areas of teaching;
• the logo should recall the hand, though not too explicitly;
• the school is the meeting point of the four types of art;
• the logo should not represent elements specific to any of the four arts, and it'd be good if it was a bit abstract.

Starting from this, I developed the first drafts.

The first two ideas represent a hand of four cards, each distinguished by the color of each artistic discipline. Given the choice, I would have preferred one on the right, although it more closely recalls something already seen.

The idea at the bottom left is the result pursued by the school in the form of firework, which is the challenging way (in black) leading to an explosion of art, a brilliant result. It also should have been a hand with four fingers, but it eventually looked more like a stunted palm tree.

Finally, the idea in the lower right is the one I like most, and it also has two manings: from inside to outside, it is the place (the school) from which the exploration of the four forms of art, while from outside to inside, it's the school as a place of meeting and mixing of disciplines, perhaps the most appropriate meaning.

At the same time I also proposed typographic part of the logo, trying to give it a fresh tone to suggest the "new". My first idea was to use Gotham, but just in case I also proposed variations in Futura and Helvetica Neue.

Obviously it is hard to reason about a composition without seeing it in action.

However, for many reasons—not least the cost of the font—we proceeded together to develop a new logo, which eventually was not used. The font in this case is Existence Light.

I don't think it's elegant for me to say which one I would have chosen, but anyways: