Creative Repository

Hi! As promised earlier, here I am with an account of one of my recent design projects, a logo design which I completed recently for a client. A couple weeks back, Rafaeel Akbar Choudhary approached me who required a logo for his SMS based service “YaaDahani”. Rafaeel, a.k.a “Roofi” is a serial entrepreneur, Product Evangelist, Brand & Project Manager, IT & Telecom Consultant, Leadership Trainer, Blogger, Underground Band Promoter and an Event Planner. Perhaps this pretty much sums up his life.

YaaDahani is an “Urdu” language word which means “Reminder”. It is derived from “Yaad” which means “Remember”. Basically, it is an SMS based service to which users can subscribe to, set reminders for themselves as well as others; whether it be a birthday, wedding, party or any event. The name was chosen in Urdu in order to provide a more personalized feeling for the locals.

Design Brief

The main aspect of the design brief was to create a personalized identity which communicates the idea of remembrance. The design needed to have both English and Urdu language incorporated in the logo for making it understandable to the masses. This was a challenging part as Urdu letters are entirely different from English alphabets. (YaaD in Urdu language can be seen written on the top right of my sketches). Moreover, unlike English, it is read from right (as is the case with Arabic language). The target audience was the youth who use cell phones in their daily lives and love to keep in touch with each other through SMS and VAS (Value Added Services). Therefore, the use of colors was really important in the design of this logo. To remind someone or being reminded generally brings happiness to one’s lives and therefore, the logo needed to be clean, stylish and modern as well.

Logo Development

I started out with some sketches on my pad, trying to incorporate both the English as well as Urdu language letters in the logo. Initially, Roofi named his service as “Yaad”, meaning “remember”. I was half way through when he rang me up and told me that he wanted his service named as “YaaDahani”, meaning “Reminder”. So, that’s the reason you would find both versions on my sketch pad.

I wasn’t quite satisfied with most of my sketches until I hit upon the Smiley one. It created the curve I needed for the first letter of  Urdu language part, whereas the upper part of the letter “Y” would accommodate for the second letter. I could then add two dots below the smiley (the curved part for the first Urdu letter), thus keeping in consideration both of the languages.   Initially, I used a variation of the Hobo Std font. The smiley looked quite well beneath the font; I sent a draft over to Roofi who liked it as well. However, I wanted something more personalized and unique and therefore dropped the idea of trying any more fonts and decided to create a unique typeface for the service.

Personalizing the Brand

Once I dropped the idea of using any fonts, I decided to make one. I opened up Illustrator and started out with basic shapes, in this case, rectangles and circles. The entire logo was made out of circles and rectangles, tweaked and tucked. I would create a circle and trim and tweak parts of it to shape the letters.

In the above image, the red lines represent the shapes which I used for the typeface, whereas the ones in blue were discarded off. I would have stopped there but I didn’t like the cornered edges all around, so I made a few tweaks, rounded off the edges and came up with a more modern and stylish look. (Someone later told me that a similar but not an exact font was available, and I could have tweaked that; but I was happy that I had created something unique and personalized myself).

The tweaked version is shown in the above image. The corners were rounded. The above design creates a happy face out of the double “a” serving as eyes, the smiley accommodating part of the Urdu letter with two dots beneath, and the upper part of “Y” was tweaked for the second part of Urdu letters.

Color Options

Although the colors in the logo were important in the sense as they were more youth targeted, nevertheless, the logo had to serve right in both black and white versions. The Black and White version is shown below:

We tried a number of color combos. Roofi hadn’t a great concern about the options presented to him. In fact, he was having trouble deciding among the four shown here. Finally, the decision was locked down on the Purple and Green one and was selected by the client. The tag-line goes, “Bhoolna-Ab Sirf Bahana” which means “Forgetting is just an excuse!”.

The header as it appears with the tag-line on the brand’s website:

I won’t say that this was the best creative solution I designed. There could be a lot of other options. I learn from other designers out there who are constantly providing valuable resources and inspiration to the design community. Therefore, any comments/feedback would be appreciated. Thanks to Rafaeel Akbar Choudhary for providing me a chance to work with him. I wish him all the best in launching his service and future ventures.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.