Maple Custom Engraving
Brand Development
Summary
Maple Custom Engraving (MCE) is a family-run commercial engraving business providing services to the Greater Toronto Area for over 35 years. This B2B-focused business provides laser engraving services for items such labels for industrial and electrical wire panels, and commercial machinery
A full brand design benefited MCE to help solidify the company's presence in the commercial engraving industry. While the company primarily operates offline, branding for print collateral such as business cards and invoices is just as important in achieving customer brand recognition.
Role
Graphic Designer
Tech Stack
Adobe Illustrator
Figma
Colour Palette
Pantone 1797 U
Pantone 704 U
Pantone 7604 U
Neutral Black U
Paper White
Colour Palette
The chosen colour palette was carefully curated to reflect the company's values of expertise, efficiency, and professionalism.
The bright red symbolizes action, strength, and warmth, and is also a recognizable colour of Canada and the maple leaf– both important imagery and qualities of MCE. The dark red is used as a complimentary colour to create depth and contrast to the bright red.
White is primarily used in this colour palette to represent cleanliness, perfection, and professionalism, while the classic black creates accessible contrast when used as text colour over a white background. Lastly, cream is used as a transition colour to support the bridge between the reds and black/white shades.
Typography
Typography
Gloock Regular is used with typeface customization for the MCE wordmark logo. This serif font is clean-cut and professional, simply iterating at a glance the long-standing nature of MCE as an established business.
Body copy uses Open Sans font, a sans-serif font that is highly legible for both web and print. Certain letters of this font offer a "traditional" type aesthetic such as the loop-tail on the lowercase "g".
Primary Logo
Before
After
Primary Logo
As a Canadian company located in Maple, Ontario, the maple leaf and Canadian imagery was important when designing this logo. This new logo was designed to help distinguish MCE as distinct from other competitors in the industry.
The modern logo update helps emphasize qualities of professionalism and expertise for the brand. Condensing the number of colours within the logo helps ensure cohesiveness within the entire design and increases visual accessibility.
Shapes and Patterns
Shapes and Patterns
The main shape used in MCE branding is the semi-rounded quadrilateral. Used to frame images, call-to-actions, and to help create visual hierarchy, the semi-rounded quadrilateral is a modern and dynamic way to engage customers visually. A mix of rounded and sharp corners also reflects the path the core tool of the business– the laser engraver– creates.
This shape can be used on a variety of MCE products such as business cards and professional documents.
Coming Soon
MCE branded collateral!
