The official Long Island Ice Cream Tour logo. By Derek Steen.
Founded in 2011, the event was just a small family day of fun. By the second year, I knew we needed a logo to represent the event when sharing it with friends and in a Facebook event. It started with the now-iconic 4-scoop ice cream cone which I created as a vector in Illustrator. Then I used a simple yet fun typeface (Eurofurence) for the text portion of the graphics.
Each year, I make a square image containing the year’s colour theme for use on social media. A circular gradient is used in the background and I log the RGB colours in a database to reference when creating additional graphics for that given year.
In 2020, we began a podcast that shares the history of each ice cream shop. Tour attendees can listen to each short episode as they drive to the next location to better understand how the ice cream is made and the generational involvement in many of them.
I’ve made various icons for the LIICT website. This includes various sides of favicons which are optimised for saving as a home screen icon on phones and tablets.
The ice cream cones are used as icons on the locations of each ice cream parlour for our map that attendees use to decide which section of the tour they will join. Much like our other branding with yearly colours, an ice cream “flavour” is picked to fit with that year’s colour. For 2018, the colour was pink, so a strawberry ice cream cone was placed on the map.
Due to our success and subsequent media coverage, in 2019 we began charging admission for the event which included a branded t-shirt and stickers. I also created flyers for each location on the tour to hang in the window in the weeks leading up to the event. For the flyers, I kept the important information front and center while capturing the fun nature and yearly colour of the event. Each flyer displays a different time, address, and stop number.
Here’s an example of our LIICT 2019 sticker in print. The square logo was cropped to be a circle with a bleed edge and saved with in a CMYK colour space. It yielded a high quality print that didn’t need any document preparation from the print shop.
To add to the ever-expanding multimedia created for the tour, I began a LIICT podcast for the 2020 tour. Due to the pandemic, we weren’t allowed to bring attendees behind the counter to visualise how ice cream is made. It’s a really awesome experience that we were saddened to put on pause. My solution was to gather all the research and history we’ve gained over the last decade and share that.
I wrote the script. Anna and Leah proofread the script. Each of the LIICT crew recorded their parts in different locations. Then I edited and mastered the files. I used Anchor to publish the files and distribute them to all the podcast networks. Attendees absolutely love listening to each episode as they drive to the different locations on the tour.
I looped the track “Submarine” by Dyalla in the background for ambiance and to mask some of the background noise.