Selected Berkeley Community College student’s design for new retail store

The bookstore inside the Alameda Free Library selected a new logo designed by a local college student.

Books for Friends (BFF), the retail bookstore inside the Alameda Main Library near the café, chose the logo from Berkeley Community College student Jerry Hsiao, who is studying for a career in visual design.

The logo design has a lime green background with the Book for Friends name initials (BFF) making up the outline of a book’s back cover.

“I just tried to create a very simple, memorable design,” said Hsiao, who will use his winning design in his portfolio when he starts looking for jobs.

The BFF opened in April. Since its inception, the team operating the endeavor, Friends of the Alameda Free Library (FAL), has been looking for ways to promote the retail store.

FAL’s Communication Chair Karen Manuel contacted her friend Patrick Kenney, an Alameda resident who teaches design classes at Berkeley City College. Kenney proposed offering a logo design challenge to his students as a competition.

“The chance to have a committee provide actual client feedback was really significant in offering a professional experience,” Kenney said. “We had 28 different students in this class, who all approached this with a completely different vision.”

The students were given four weeks to come up with their final logo designs. Students were given very specific rules for the competition.
Students started with a symbolic pictographic logo element, then added typography, and finally combined them in a way that reflects the brand’s design personality. These initial steps were done by hand with paper, pen, and pencil.

“This class is about getting students to use sketching as a rapid visualization technique to explore their design ideas, to be creative before touching the computer,” Kenney says.

The BFF logo committee met weekly to go over the latest versions of student designs. “We spent a lot of time going through each one of the submissions and identifying elements that we thought might work,” said FAL President Karen Butter said. “It was a very interesting process for us. There were three top designs that were really hard for us to select from.”

The logo committee included Butter and Manuel, who have been with Friends leadership for many years, along with Philip Barry, who curates the book selection in the shop, and Serena Hom, who has a background in retail brand marketing.

For FAL, the logo is another way to communicate how the library benefits the Alameda community. The logo will appear on signs, bookmarks, and other marketing materials for the shop.

BFF is located inside the Alameda Main Library, located at 1550 Oak St. Store hours are noon to 4 p.m., Thursday through Saturday.