esker cycles
Esker Identity
When Tim & Ryan Krueger left their respective brands in the bike industry, they got started on creating a tire company called Terrene. Terrene was made for mountain bikers, by mountain bikers. They needed some reworks to a logo and help making an icon for it. I was fortunate to be able to help them with that project. Not long after, I was contacted by Tim again to get started on a totally new brand of bike frames. They already had the name Esker Cycles. They wanted it to be an approachable mountain bike brand. They didn’t have any intention of expanding on mountain bikes at the time. Still, they are dirt specific, making steel, titanium and aluminum frames.
My task from the inception was to create the complete identity of Esker that later led into making color and finish choices for the frames, icons for the bikes and some of the components that created a cohesive feel.
Wanna-be type designer
It was 2017 when I designed this logo. I already had plenty of time to design a typeface, at least. I just never had the opportunity, or the excuse to make the time. Looking back to when I had more creative time, I probably should have. When I was a kid, I would draw graffiti (of course), but before that I called it “creative writing.” I laugh about it now, but I would draw interesting letterforms and alphabets based on album covers, skateboards ETC, but never did I think I was making type. Fast forward, I had some typography classes, I had even made a font in a class with Chank Diesel back in the old design school days. RIP to that on a ZIP disc somewhere in a landfill. This is all to say that I had a basic knowledge of how to create type.
For Esker, I wanted this to be an original typeface that one could see and recognize at various scales. The one request was that the wordmark be lowercase. I felt this was a little flimsy, but I wasn’t going to argue. So, I studied a number of fonts and their typefaces. Looking to inspiration from Tobias Frere-Jones and a number of my favorite gothic typefaces that you’d see on the open road, I began to sketch ways this could look and show up on bike frames and stylized in a minimal way. Most of all, I was looking for minimalism. The bike industry was too full of maximalist logos.
As you can see in the image above, I drew the type from scratch and played with the E to see if there were ways to make this more ownable. Once I put it to Illustator and traced it, it didn’t feel right. The movement wasn’t right. So, I rotated the lowercase e and extended the stroke. This gave a geometric/organic feel that I was looking to. Eskers are in nature, S shaped and rounded but have an edge to them. The S and the E needed to work in this way also.
One of these days I’ll finally make the full set of type. There are a few edits I wouldn’t mid making now that I’ve seen it all this time… TBD
Final logo once traced in Illustrator.
The best part to this project was eventually riding the bikes that I got to put my work into.
A small part of the head badge exploration. I wanted this to play off an actual esker, but work with the e portion. At the end of the day, we just needed the ‘e’ because this represented the early phase of the brand best. It was easy and ownable. We could always revisit. Part of my exploration was also looking into the ice age creatures that lived in our region in the driftless where eskers were so noticeable.
Forgive the moray of the image. It’s all that i have left of this exploration. The mammoth would have also made a great headbadge, but wasn’t right. That said, it wasn’t unusable. We latched on to the idea of taking these illustrations and creatures and give them to the bike frames and products. the mammoth graphic ended up on Esker’s Epoch handle bar that I cannot for the life of me get an image of, so here’s the mammoth.
