Since its establishment in 1982, USA Today has been heralded a unique and groundbreaking newspaper, setting itself apart by implementing visual storytelling and producing concise, to-the-point copy. Founder Al Neuharth proclaimed that the paper was “designed to be different.” Nearing its thirtieth anniversary as one of the top two largest-circulating newspapers in the United States, USA Today approached Wolff Olins to evolve its logo and master brand identity. It was time to recapture the boldness and innovation that had driven the company from the start.
The existing logo looked dated, and internally the pressures of navigating the changing media landscape had led to a fractured brand structure and a lack of consistent vision for the future. Creative Director Lisa Smith, who led the project, says, “The objective was to create a flexible, but consistent, identity system. We set out to organize their brand architecture to accommodate their many business areas and bring USA Today back to its iconic position in America.”
The first phase entailed identifying the core identity and its critical elements while also outlining a clear design brief based on USA Today’s main attributes: “simple” and “straight to the point.” The Wolff Olins team collaborated with Co:collective to articulate the brand’s story, which revolved around the notion that the newspaper reflected the “pulse of the nation,” and infused this into the design work.
Because of the logo’s status as an American icon, the team did not want to alter its central attributes in any drastic way. “The logo was an evolution, not a revolution from the original,” says Smith. “We started by taking apart each component of the original and made decisions around each piece. We broke out of the box, literally, and were left with a circle that was an abstraction of the original logo.”
Homing in on the circle shape, the designers experimented with keeping different aspects of the previous mark, such as its stripes and flag-like format. The process became one of distillation, down to the strongest version of each part working together.
At first, the designers thought that the existing typeface, sans serif Futura, was overly associated with the eighties because of its tight kerning, but when researching global news brands, they found that a sans serif typeface in fact provided a distinctive feature. They decided to keep the Futura and customize it to make it more than just a logotype, but a functional typeface that would have strong recognition across all platforms.
With the European font company Bold Monday, the team redrew each letter, noticeably shortening the ascenders and descenders to work editorially in headings, which often have to squeeze into small amounts of real estate in layouts and on the website.
As USA Today was the first newspaper to incorporate a range of colors in its pages, the chosen shades have long been renowned across the brand and its many cobrands, with most people associating them with navigation, from Sports to Life to Travel. The designers improved and brightened the colors, changing the Travel sub-brand to aqua, for example, to differentiate it from the master brand, blue.
Building on the newspaper’s longstanding leadership position in visual storytelling, what became a logo circle could now perform as a platform for live infographics. The graphics change with the news, allowing the newsroom to highlight the stories that matter most to the paper’s readership—the nation at large.
“The USA Today logo was redesigned to be as dynamic as the news itself,” explains Smith. “Representing the pulse of the nation, the logo can be used as a platform to express USA Today’s editorial spirit: fun, bold, and impactful.”
Wolff Olins worked closely with the internal USA Today graphics and editorial team, testing the logo for two months prior to the public launch to create guiding principles around what could and couldn’t be done with the brand behavior. For example, they clarified that the logos that would be used on the masthead and section fronts of the newspaper and website should either have a clever twist, be a straight-to-the-point depiction, or be an enticing and provocative graphic representing the related news story.
While developing the master brand identity, it became apparent that in order to bring it fully to life, the newspaper itself would have to be wholly reconceived. Beginning in early 2012, members of the Wolff Olins team spent many days on the newsroom floor, shadowing the process from the morning news meeting to sending to press at 10 p.m. Editors, page designers, the graphics and illustration department, and the production and advertising department all took part in the research and development of the paper’s new look.
“Our goal was to place the brand across the entire ecosystem,” Smith says. “We modernized the printed paper by developing a new approach to content presentation and kept everything concise, factual. We added more color pages to simplify navigation, introduced a hierarchy across stories, and focused on visual storytelling.” The designers also created bespoke pictograms that referred to the digital content USA Today generated with Fantasy Interactive.
The redesign of USA Today’s visual system encompassed not only a bright new master brand and cobrand identities but also refined brand architecture, a redesigned newspaper, and a fresh advertising campaign across all media platforms. Response to the change has been overwhelmingly positive from Gannett, the media and marketing company that owns USA Today, and the public at large. With 1.8 million copies circulating every weekday and growing, one in every seven Americans interacts with USA Today on a weekly basis.
Dongfeng Motor Corporation, one of China’s oldest and largest automobile manufacturers, was founded in 1969. At the core of its business is the Dongfeng Passenger Vehicle Company, which encompasses a wide range of passenger-vehicle brands. For the latest series of the Aeolus brand, the Aeolus 4S, Dongfeng sought to update the visual identity that had originally represented the broader company. By 2016, Aeolus would comprise every type of passenger car, including energy-efficient and electric vehicles, and Dongfeng wanted to signal this future expansion with a sharper mark. They turned to Dongdao Design to make it happen.
Aeolus needed a consistent brand presence in the marketplace and on the car itself in order to stand out from the competition. Dongfeng asked for a visual system that could be standardized and applied to every vehicle type, including those coming down the road in the future.
“We believed that our client was not taking full advantage of the Dongfeng brand in the Aeolus identity,” states Yide Zou, the project’s design director and general manager of Dongdao’s Brand Center.
The challenge became how to instigate a consistent visual tone across the Dongfeng brand and its passenger-vehicle brand and ensure that this new system was extendable to future series. At the same time, it was important to communicate Aeolus’s brand philosophy creatively through the logo.
From the beginning, Dongdao worked with one clear direction, which was a subtle change to the shape of the Dongfeng logo. In recent years, the icon had grown into an ellipse. Dongdao wanted to bring it back to a perfect circle.
In order to do this, the abstract swallow shapes, which had been encircled within the logo since its launch in 1987, would have to be realigned for balance and fluidity. The swallow is an auspicious bird in China, as it represents luck. “Dongfeng chose swallows with the hope that its vehicles would bring happiness and luck to its customers,” explains Zou.
Dongdao’s solution was to geometrize the two swallows and add a three-dimensional metallic-silver effect. They based the circular composition on the yin and yang symbol, which not only stands for stability but also represents motion, reflecting healthy and sustainable development.
In the final solution, the designers beveled the swallow shapes, creating dramatic shading and optimizing the sculptural quality of the design so that it stands out in ad campaigns and, quite literally, on the vehicles themselves. Dongfeng loved the three-dimensional appearance.
Over the course of two years, Dongdao generated the new visual identity system for Aeolus, which beyond the logo extended to every 4S vehicle—from the design of the car key to the taillight signature to the mark’s presence inside the car and on its exterior—as well as to Dongfeng’s internal office communications, advertising, and 4S dealerships. Both Dongfeng and consumers have been pleased with the look. Dongdao Design was hired on to design the brand identity for Dongfeng’s new commercial vehicle, which launched in 2013.
On April 30, 2013, also known as Queen’s Day, Willem-Alexander became the first king of the Netherlands to be inaugurated in 122 years. The Amsterdam-based design firm Koeweiden Postma was approached by the city to mastermind, quite quickly, a jubilant yet cohesive visual system for the festivities, which not only included the inauguration but also the annual Queen’s Day celebrations. The project brief outlined the need for a consistent style throughout while implementing different accents for the two events. Koeweiden Postma’s goal was to find the right unifying elements and shapes while flavoring the two celebrations with differentiating color palettes.
As red, white, and blue are the national colors of the Netherlands, these would be infused into the Willem-Alexander identity, along with the traditional orange connected to the royal family, always used on Queen’s Day. Additionally, the color of the city of Amsterdam is red, and so the Queen’s Day Amsterdam identity would also feature orange and red side by side.
Keeping in mind the public spaces in which the events would be held, Koeweiden Postma envisioned an identity system that would succeed on an enormous scale. The fact that the visuals would be displayed everywhere, on posters, billboards, building banners, and more, influenced their thinking about what the design elements could and should do.
“It was clear from the beginning that the design solution had to be applicable for a lot of different carriers,” explains designer Eddy Wegman. “In order to get as much impact as possible, the design had to be recognized easily, like an ongoing streamer throughout the city.”
Every application had to feel and look the same, without becoming a boring repetition of the same visual. Because the design would interact with various types of architecture, and most important with the historical architecture in the city, the designers steered toward a direction that blended in with Amsterdam’s elegant, symmetrical, and monumental nature. They masterminded a diagonal pattern—like a magnified weave—that can be repeated over and over again and therefore work on both small and large scales without losing its sense of dynamism and playfulness.
In terms of the icon, their first thought was to incorporate a crown. But because Willem-Alexander would not be crowned but inaugurated, this no longer made sense. The next obvious element was his monogram, along with the national colors.
“The final solution of the modernized monogram came very quickly,” Wegman admits. “We didn’t sketch for a long time. We felt the logo had to be strong and simple and fit for a modern-day ‘kingship.’”
The woven-diagonal design and contemporary monogram—cleverly intertwining the W and A of the king’s name—extended across both the inauguration and the Queen’s Day celebrations, differentiated only by color. As both the red, white, and blue of the Netherlands and the orange of the House of Orange-Nassau are intrinsic to the cultural identity of the entire country, the combination made utter sense. Koeweiden Postma tested the colors for various production techniques due to the sheer number of diverse applications.
To further personalize the design and give it a human touch, the designers added a handwritten element. “We wanted something unique, for a unique day, not to be seen somewhere else,” says Wegman. They wrote the year 2013—which appears throughout the visual system—manually and then perfected the numbers to get the right balance between readability and irregularity. In its slant and proportion, the final version complements the symmetrical and monumental style of the overall design.
Another component was the city’s existing marketing slogan, “I Amsterdam,” which has been employed every Queen’s Day for the past ten years. The designers incorporated the phrase in various applications identifying specific activities in and around the city to carry on and amplify the traditions of the day through the new identity concept.
With the challenge of fitting all of the moments on what was both a historic occasion and a national holiday—including the inauguration in the Royal Palace; every festivity throughout the city; and an evening cruise on the IJ lake—Koeweiden Postma’s ultimate goal was to bind them all together. Meanwhile, the identity had to be something every Dutch person enjoyed looking at and that engaged viewers everywhere, from the king himself to locals, visitors, and the vast international audience watching on television and online.
“In short, we had the challenge to design the ultimate Dutch business card for that day,” muses Wegman. The city dressing went off without a hitch and to an overwhelmingly positive response.
Every app needs an icon, just as every brand needs a logo. In many cases, they are one and the same. Designing an app icon means reaching an enormously wide audience in a rather confined, rounded-square space.
ShopLove, a third-party shopping aggregator app that performs as an online flipbook of one’s favorite brands in fashion, furniture, and accessories, asked Berlin-based graphic designer Linda Gavin, known for creating the Twitter logotype, to mastermind an icon for both its app and website. Specifically, the entity sought a heart for its mark. It in fact needed two hearts, visually linked: a two-dimensional version that would live primarily in the shop’s interface and a more three-dimensional, realistic heart for the app icon.
“I drew a lot of hearts,” remembers Gavin. “It took days before we found something we loved. The heart is already a very popular symbol to use within this genre of apps, so it had to be special. I made so many different custom shapes.”
Gavin finalized the flat version in the first round of sketches, along with the logotype using Marketing Script, and selected fonts and a color palette. She also created other custom icons for the shop’s interface.
The 3-D version took a while to tailor right and make unique; it had to look great as a flat icon and thus be minimal yet memorable. Gavin’s ultimate challenge was to make the heart appear simple but feel tangible at the same time. She worked a jersey texture into the lush red of the heart shape to give it a spongy, breathing depth. She takes her textures from photographs and applies them to designs in Illustrator and Photoshop.
ShopLove seized upon the final design because it looked three-dimensional and therefore more interesting than a plain form. The icon appears to curl in on itself while still upholding a straightforward heart shape.
From the solution, Gavin could create multiple versions of the icon to suit different international markets as well as shopping seasons. “Every culture is different and we picked the most Nordic-looking icon to go with first,” Gavin states. “It’s always possible to change the look and feel of the icon as long as the colors stay the same. I love the shiny red heart version, which might work well in the Asian market during Christmastime.”
Gavin’s design for the ShopLove logo and app icon fits seamlessly with the company’s mentality and bighearted enthusiasm for its forward-thinking venture. It may have taken a number of tries, but both client and designer are thrilled with the outcome—a symbol both strong and endearing at the same time.
Android is a larger-than-life brand name today, representing the world’s top-selling smartphone operating system. But before 2005, the year it was bought by Google, Android was a concept in motion, dreamed up by serial entrepreneur Andy Rubin. Envisioning a new kind of software company that develops operating systems and applications for mobile devices, Rubin knew that the brand would have to speak to businesses and consumers alike. He had worked with the San Francisco–based design firm Character on a previous venture, Danger Inc., and asked for their help in creating the identity for his new startup.
Before 2005, Android’s identity development was markedly informal—this was Rubin’s dream project. He had acquired the Android URL and wanted to play with its brand presence, to personalize it.
“Originally, the Android identity was more about Andy than about Android itself,” explains Character cofounder Tish Evangelista, who was lead creative director on the project. “Working with Andy was the inspiration for the design. Unlike other big identities in which a lot of people are involved, this was a one-on-one project.”
The groundbreaking concept behind the Android operating system was that it would be an open platform, so that any mobile device company could license it (unlike Apple’s iOS). Rubin, from the beginning, wanted the visual system to reflect this, omitting rules and regulations in the early stages of developing the brand. Character’s main task, then, was to create a unique and ownable brand look and feel for Android that would resonate with both business and consumer audiences, allowing either sector to use the Android identity as it wanted.
Rubin’s lifelong passion for robots and science fiction fed directly into Character’s early logo explorations. The design brief included reading Philip K. Dick’s novel (and genesis of the Android name) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and watching Blade Runner, the sci-fi film based on the book. Rubin also introduced a character that he had in mind, a friendly robot figure that would speak for his sense of humor and imagination as the visual system evolved.
Character began an exhaustive exploration of different logotypes revolving around the themes of various sci-fi movies and works of fiction.
“We asked ourselves, ‘If Android were a movie director, how would that look?’” says Evangelista. “If he were Steven Spielberg, what would that look like?” The Character team created logotypes mimicking different movies, from Pixar films to Alien. They presented more than twenty-five different designs to Rubin.
The ultimate solution meshed the sci-fi theme with the idea of using only perfect geometric shapes—circles and squares—to reflect Rubin’s thought process, which is methodical and mathematical. The designers implemented a bright, fresh green in the logotype to represent growth and openness, harkening back to the company’s original intention of providing an open-platform operating system.
After Google acquired Android, aspects of the visual system were susceptible to user manipulation due to the identity’s lack of regulations. “People placed a cowboy hat on the robot,” Evangelista recalls. “Android needed to reign it in and set down some brand ingredients.”
With Rubin, Character established guidelines for how the Android identity could appear, producing an “Ingredient Brand Style Guide” that illustrates acceptable usages of the brand mark, logotype, and color palette. The finished visual system maps out every design element in the Android brand, from its distinctive logotype to its robot icon, color palette, typography, lockups, and numerous applications. In its dual senses of fun and high-tech futurism, the identity is as bold and innovative as the technology itself.
The project that graphic designer and animator Fraser Davidson took on for SB Nation was not the creation of a single logo or identity but of more than 350 logos, one for each sports blog in the SB Nation network. At the same time, the mission was to create an overarching and recognizable brand presence by styling each logo in a similar way. Since its launch in 2004, the sports-blog hub had grown rapidly, taking on dozens of unique voices, each with its own, distinct personality. Eight years later, in 2012, the SB Nation logo itself had begun to disappear behind the often radically disparate blog identities.
“We started noticing that readers often weren’t aware that their favorite site was a part of SB Nation,” says Ted Irvine, director of design at Vox Media, which powers SB Nation. “Despite the SBN logo sitting just above each blog logo, somehow folks weren’t making the connection.”
Up until then, the team at Vox Media had shepherded each logo online. Now it was time to give the “family” of SB Nation logos a unifying voice. They hit upon the notion of hiring a single designer to create all 350-plus logos, including that for SB Nation. This way, there would be no mistaking the overall brand each time an individual team, region, or sport was speaking.
Coming across Davidson’s work on Dribble, they seized upon his ability to simplify a sports identity to its essential parts. Davidson is an animator by trade whose work for sports entities has grown from a hobby to projects for Nike. Vox Media gathered the different logos the bloggers had created, mainly by hand, and passed them on to Davidson. The bloggers were given questionnaires to fill out so that they could say what they liked about their original designs and wanted to keep. The task then became to refine the designs and bring them up a notch so that they attained a consistent level of sophistication as well as overall uniformity.
Davidson set out to simplify the imagery he was given so that nothing infringed upon what was relevant or that related to a team. “One initial problem was finding the right ‘holding device’ that would contain the logo imagery as well as tie all of the different logos together,” he states. Vox Media had come up with a circular shape for the SB Nation logo itself but was still toying with crest and shield shapes—common in sports identities—for the individual blogs. The thought was to let each mark keep its unique typography in order to maintain autonomy. But the more they experimented with how these forms would coexist online, it became clear that this would produce too many problems in terms of layout for each design.
Finally Davidson and the team decided that the circular shape was the right lockup for each and every identity, as it gave the most flexibility for all of the potential applications.
“Especially in sports, people become tied to marks,” Davidson points out. The power behind each logo came from thousands of fans bonding behind a cause, team, and city. He had to enforce above all else the essence of what each group bonded over. There were six different types of marks: region, such as major cities; sport, such as baseball, hockey, soccer, etc.; college; professional; general blogs about a sport; and specialty blogs, such as Out Sports (about gay athletes), drag racing, and more.
Each questionnaire that a blogger completed became a creative brief that Vox Media then handed to Davidson to do his own discovery work. The experience was much like having three hundred different branding conversations over a period of weeks, but Davidson works fast, hand drawing on computer. Diving in, he created more than 330 logos in just six weeks. He started with professional football and then moved through each sport, working through the logos by category.
A common motif he found was a state outline or city skyline, but in numerous cases these were unrecognizable to a wider audience and had to be reconceived. There were also copyright issues to address, as the blogs are separate from a team’s official site, and so he had to be careful not to replicate imagery that belonged to a team, city, or other entity.
The project, heralded as “SB Nation United” by Vox Media, launched in late 2012 to enthusiastic acclaim and great admiration for Davidson’s comprehensive as well as swift design work. The family of logos continues to grow.
American Standard, in more ways than one, is a household name. Having provided plumbing and fixtures for families for more than 130 years, the brand itself had become a “fixture” in homes across America. In 2012, company president Jay Gould called upon Sterling Brands, with which he had worked on major brands in the past, to give a fresh spin to the logo and identity system—in essence, to raise its standards.
The tagline “Raise the Standard” had been developed in-house along with a new mission for the brand: to show the world how innovative American Standard has always been. American Standard Brands was awarded a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant in 2012 to develop and test a low-cost, prefabricated toilet system in developing world countries, yet no one seemed to know this about the company.
“Jay Gould wanted to reintroduce the brand to a whole new generation of consumers,” says Debbie Millman, president of Sterling Brands. “He wanted it to be more accurately seen as the progressive organization that it was.”
The existing logo—American Standard written out in a style of script intended to look like handwriting—had served as the brand’s word mark since 1899. It was time for a statement about the entire, far-reaching entity of American Standard, one that spoke to a more socially and environmentally conscious audience. Gould wanted to start by reconceiving the mark, from which every other element would grow.
Sterling Brands’s initial evaluation of the logotype revealed that, although the script felt approachable, functioned well with secondary messaging, and reproduced easily, its conservative look did not express the passion and unique vision of the company. The script had even become dated compared to competitors’ logos and lacked a certain “evidence of hand that would prompt it to ring true in the hearts and minds of their internal and external audiences,” states Creative Director Kim Berlin.
The mission became to leverage the script—which was recognizable, even classic—so that it conveyed American Standard’s inventiveness and forward-thinking personality as well as its message of optimism. At the same time, the supporting visual system would have to be easy to implement across all products and communications and flexible enough to build and maintain a clear brand voice.
The explorations were preceded by a thorough assessment of the category and resulted in the plotting of a unique color territory. The team found an opportunity for American Standard to stand out in the warm, sunny zone of marigold, teal, and gray. The designers developed a range of twelve directions the logo could take, with more classic solutions on one end of the spectrum and more innovative expressions on the other. Ultimately, the team narrowed them to two concepts: Number 1 with its strong tie to the brand’s heritage and Number 7 representing a total shift away from the existing identity.
Number 1 celebrated the original word mark by keeping the script, but upped its dynamism by changing the color and angling the mark upward to the right. The A and the S found a mutual connection point, sealing the logotype and creating a monogram that could be extracted from the word mark and used as a standalone element, similar to an endorsement or sign-off.
Number 7 paired a crisp sans serif word mark with an AS monogram centered between the two words in the brand name. Inspired by the script of the existing American Standard logo, the A and the S were combined to create an expressive droplet whose rendering paid homage to the original mark while shifting the brand forward in a meaningful way. The drop monogram could also function as a standalone element throughout the visual system.
Both the design team and the American Standard team were divided on which direction to take. In the end, Gould left the decision in Millman’s hands.
“I decided that, given how much else was changing about the brand and its presence in the marketplace, it made more strategic sense to keep something of the existing word mark, while number seven would have been an aesthetic choice,” explains Millman. “The ultimate solution harkens back to the heritage of the brand.”
The team designed a visual system that places the new logo at the center of its universe and uses scale and dynamic cropping to express the forward-thinking qualities of the brand. Millman admires the way the monogram that comes out of the word mark can be used like an icon in certain cases, so that the link to the company’s heritage is there while breaking free from the old logotype. A fresh photographic style and approach to typography support the modern feel and complete the identity system.
The American Standard visual system was launched in spring 2013 to tremendously positive reviews inside the company and out.
Creative Director: Kim Berlin; Typographer: Holly Dickens; Designer: Theresa Chee
For VERG founder Matt Vergotis, the logo design he created for his own company led to identity projects for other ventures. Amber Events, which specializes in event production in Gold Coast, Australia, admired the gemlike quality of the VERG logo and in 2012 sought something similar for its own mark. The chiseled, transparent surface is created by manipulating gradient overlays, something Vergotis has experimented with for a while. With the technique established, it then became a matter of conceptualizing the theme for the brand mark.
Just as the V in the VERG logo represents the name and a quality simultaneously, Vergotis used the A in Amber Events to initiate a duality of name and theme in the icon. Because the company handles all phases of event design through to implementation, its mark would have to be confident in its execution and thus indicative of the service it provides clients.
“The idea I had was to capture, with the use of geometry, the bringing to life of an event,” Vergotis explains. “A symbol that portrayed the moment a light shines on it, the moment it takes center stage.”
He worked through sketches that traced the process of event production using the arrow-like shape of the letter A. The peak grows upward and breaks free of its box to create an image that conveys a spotlight as well as an envelope (the invitation) all in one. Whereas the forms are simply a triangle poking out of a square, after only moments, anyone can see it—the event, its moment, all lit up.
“When creating an abstract mark that’s not literal in its approach, it’s easy to infuse reasoning and rationale,” says Vergotis. “But what’s difficult is executing your conceptual idea so that the mark communicates your reasoning and rationale. While it’s not always important for people to understand it straight away, if it’s explained and people still don’t understand, then it’s missing something. The Amber Events logo makes sense in one of those clever-uses-of-geometry sort of ways without having to present something literal.”
The gradient overlays, in Vergotis’s mind, are really a matter of color choice. Complementary colors are necessary for finding an aesthetic with gradients. The designer selects his palette carefully and then makes numerous subtle changes to get the look right.
Vergotis’s presentation to Amber Events included logo functionality, color systems, and stationery concepts. The name Amber not only provided the A that sparked the logo theme, but also the color. The palette revolves around the warm, golden glow of amber, accompanied by a soft gray logotype or backdrop to accentuate it.
The designer always presents a logo in context along with the thought process that went into its creation. “It’s all about searching for that lightbulb moment,” he says. “Some ideas come to me quickly, where I start penciling them down straight away. Other times, I’ll spend many hours online researching. Then there’s the odd one where I’ve taken a phone brief and jotted down the name in a doodling fashion, finished the call, and looked down and thought to myself, ‘Hang on a minute, there’s something in this.’ Of course that’s rare; it has to be relative to the client and their request.”
Scandinavian design has for decades been the go-to style in furniture all around the world. The region’s love of the natural world established the tradition of implementing wood and organic fabrics in functional pieces created from pure, minimalist lines. Saiwala, a Russian home-furnishings brand and furniture manufacturer, wanted to accentuate its Scandinavian roots through its positioning and corporate identity. Moscow-based DDVB came on board to execute the design.
DDVB developed the positioning “In harmony with yourself,” emphasizing the spiritual connection one has to one’s surroundings and especially to one’s home environment. The brand story underscores Saiwala’s ability to bring notes of peace, harmony, and comfort into an interior.
In brainstorming different ideas for the logo, the DDVB team explored three directions illustrating the positioning. One sought a more typographical solution, overlapping the w in the word mark with a centering v to show balance and continuation. Another coalesced the sign of the Odal rune from ancient Germanic alphabets, symbolizing “heritage” and “soul,” and the image of a quiet boat to make a new icon, along with a corresponding logotype.
The team at last alighted on the symbol of the bird in Scandinavian literature, which represents the soul. The name Saiwala itself translates as “soul” in Celtic.
“The bird also represents the sun in Scandinavian countries and so embodies those attributes of warmth, comfort, tranquility, and harmony that we wanted to bring out in the identity system,” states DDVB cofounder and creative director Dmitry Peryshkov.
Designating the bird as the main icon for the corporate identity, the designers fashioned a simple silhouette and detail element that reference patterns commonly found in Nordic textiles and decoration. They spun graphics from this rudimentary, line-drawing concept that complement the bird based on the idea of Saiwala’s “naturalness.” “If we identified Saiwala with a bird,” says Art Director Vova Lifanov, “it was logical to surround it with ‘natural’ patterns such as leaves, tree branches, and more.”
To emphasize the Scandinavian love of natural materials, DDVB brought native textures such as wood, felt, and linen into the visual system. A gentle, muted color palette carried out the theme of coastal sand, rocks, and sea—the bird icon appearing in a soft gray-blue reminiscent of the North Sea.
The team developed a large number of unified applications, from the retail spaces themselves—including in-store accessories and furniture elements—to catalogs, brochures, and giveaways. Peryshkov conceived of using worn-wood boards and simple glass panels in the interior decoration of Saiwala stores and envisioned imprinting these with simple, linear drawings like the logo design. The designers produced dozens of line drawings depicting items found in the home—the runaway slipper, a mitten, a candle, a pillow.
“We found that the corporate identity matched with different kinds of interior elements, not just furniture,” Peryshkov explains. He proposed that Saiwala display pillows in its stores embroidered with the bird icon and patterning from the corporate identity, along with felt boots, candlesticks, and other items, in order to fully utilize the visual system. The items could be sold and also provided as souvenirs or giveaways with furniture purchases.
The corporate identity and visual system has launched to pleased consumers throughout Russia, extending to all retail locations as well as the Saiwala website.