What is a Chinook?
Chinooks are foehn winds in the interior West of North America, where the Canadian Prairies and Great Plains meet various mountain ranges. One of the Chinook's most striking features is the Chinook arch, which is a band of stationary stratus clouds caused by air rippling over the mountains due to orographic lifting. The stunning colors seen in the Chinook arch are quite common. Typically, the colors will change throughout the day, starting with yellow, orange, red and pink shades in the morning as the sun comes up, grey shades at midday changing to pink/red colors, and then orange/yellow hues just before the sun sets.
Design Rationale
Chinook Crafts is a business based in Calgary, AB. Their location is a Chinook hot-spot, so the name works incredibly well. I wanted to incorporate a mountain to relate to Calgary's amazing mountain ranges. Two converging winds are shown above the mountain to represent the Chinook wind. The orange and yellow hues represent the beautiful clouds that a Chinook produces, while the blue and grey represent the cool right before the warm winds.
The initial design included some objects that relate to the 'Crafts' portion of the name, but during the process the client decided to omit them from the final design. It kept the design very clean and simple.
Implementing the Design
The design will be published across the online platforms that Chinook Crafts uses, such as: Facebook, Etsy, Deviantart and their personal website. The logo will also be used in print for business cards, flyers and other advertising mediums. To make sure it would travel nicely across said platforms, the image works well on a light or dark background.
