Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Working on "Vysada" Logo

“Vysada” is a natural cosmetic company, based in Toronto. It offers a healthy alternative to today’s mainstream skin care products. “Vysada” is an ayurvedic word meaning clean, pure and simple. “Vysada”’s skin care is inspired by a 5000-year-old Ayurvedic tradition of herb and mineral science. Its unique blends of ayurvedic herbs, natural butters and therapeutic grade essential oils culminate into a healthy and natural skin care collection.

When “Vysada” approached me about creating a logo and business cards, they already had a logo prototype that used an “Om” sign as a symbol of ancient Indian philosophical tradition and a san-serif italic typeface with some oriental influences.



At the beginning I tried to create a completely hand-written logotype, imitating Sanskrit. I was gripping on the idea to use a horizontal line, running along the tops of the letters of Devanagari alphabet, to accommodate a phrase “Ayurvedic Natural Skin Care” that should be present in the logo by the special customer’s request.


Despite of my best effort, the result came out too elaborate and illegible. It didn’t at all said clean or pure, as Vysada’s motto declared. It became obvious that I need to go in completely different direction and use a modern font. At the same time the question of color came up: I felt that chosen black and red color combination didn’t work well for a cosmetic company with predominantly female target market.


Next samples show how I threw myself into the completely opposite direction. Here I used basically one of the verdanesque – very legible, very modern typeface with just a hint of organic feel about it. I also suggested to replace Om with a lotus flower which can be a symbol of Indian culture as well, but tells much more about beauty and femininity. Still, my clients felt that this logo, especially without an Om, seriously lack an Indian tune, which was crucial for the company self-identification on the market.

Back to board I was and now I was aiming to create a customized font that would be modern and legible, and at the same time carry an obvious Indian feel even if we decide to give up Om.

I chose as a base font a Adobe MoolBoran: very lightly stylised san-serif, in its basic proportions reminded very much of Lucida Sans – one of the most popular commercial typefaces, but having a very nice, soft “y”.



I reinforced an oriental mood of the font, by adding curves to the ascent of the “d” and to the top points of “V”. I also didn’t like the narrow counters of “a”, so I carved it out a little bit, which made the letter more open, softer and friendly-looking. I also added two decorative dots, imitating the diacritics, common to Sanskrit.

With this letterwork I suggested two versions of logo with the different lotus flowers: one was more modern:


And another was more traditionally looking (it required to move dots and change an ascend of “d”)

The final version is very close in proportions to the original version with the dark red flower at the top center, where was originally Om, and italic phrase underneath the company name:

3 comments:

  1. That's nice!


    Are the customers happy?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for sharing. I found it really interesting to see all of the phases of your creative process. : )

    Sharon

    ReplyDelete