Rania (rs6898) – Yes Logo Spring 2022 Class Blogs

A Beauty Salon Makeover

By Rania Sakhi

A new beauty salon, NY Ladies Beauty Lounge, has recently opened its doors on campus.

In beauty and hairdressing, first impressions matter the most and I have to say that I am not a big fan of the salon’s logo nor its exterior facade design. In this last blog post, I will redesign their logo and walk you through the process.

People frequently believe that a good logo is one that conveys a lot about the brand or is simply attractive. I once had the same belief but after taking many design classes and watching Sagi Haviv’s interview with The Futur, I now have a better understanding of what makes a logo great and iconic. For more context, Sagi Haviv is a very well-known graphic designer and partner in the design firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv and has designed some of the most iconic logos in the world such as Chase, Mobil, PBS, Showtime, and National Geographic, just to name a few. According to him, three fundamental design principles need to be present for a logo to be great:

1. It should be appropriate or relevant to the client and industry in feeling, form, and concept but doesn’t necessarily need to say a whole lot. In the case of NY’s beauty lounge and since the salon is located in Saadiyat Island at NYU Abu Dhabi, it should be elegant and close to NYU’s brand system. While the logo might seem elegant to some, their exterior shop design is just not it being too bold, crowded, and dynamic. Plus, it doesn’t really match NYUAD’s aesthetic.

**NY Ladies Beauty Lounge, Saadiyat Island.**

2. It needs to be simple or uncomplicated in form so it can work effectively and flexibly in a wide range of sizes and media.

3. It needs to be memorable or distinctive enough to be easily remembered. In my opinion, this is the main principle that the NY logo is missing. It looks like any other salon logo you can find online.

These three criteria are the questions I asked myself when I thought about redesigning NY’s logo since it is not only the centerpiece of all brand communication but also the reflection of the character, personality, and values of the salon.

As the first step in my re-design process, I started with research. I mainly looked at how other competitors in the same area are presenting and marketing themselves. NY’s main competitors are:

Tara Rose Hair and Beauty Salon

Tips and Toes

De Joie Beauty Lounge

Ivy Beauty & Bubbles

Bellacure Beauty Lounge

After the research, I tried to understand what can work and most importantly how I can differentiate NY Ladies Beauty Lounge from its competitors. I then started brainstorming ideas and created a clear mood board that is basically a collection of visuals that capture the salon’s essence and personality and customers, or perhaps how I would visualize it myself if I had to design their brand identity.

When it comes to sketching, I started drawing symbols and anything that came into my mind by hand.

When the idea became clearer to me, I quickly switched to Illustrator and decided to simply go with a luxurious and distinctive typographic treatment of the salon’s name: NY or New York. I tested different colors, fonts, spacing, alignment, and so on and kept pink and red as my final color palette. For the font, I chose Pinyon Script that I found after 3 days of deep research. Finally, this is what I came up with.

And here are the logo’s variations.

Once the design was done, I wanted to test the viability of the logo concept by creating mockups on Photoshop relevant to the beauty salon to see how it will work in real life. For this, I chose to work on a business card, a brochure, a shop facade, a hanging poster and wall sign, a home service car, a cosmetics packaging, a mug and T-shirts for staff.

Overall, as much as I enjoyed working on this little redesign, I strongly believe that great logos do not happen by accident. They are the result of strategic thinking, exploring, failing and designing again. Furthermore, each aspect of a logo, whether it is font, shape or colors influence people’s perception of the brand. In this blog post, I specifically focused on NY’s ladies beauty lounge. However, there are so many other logos out there that I think need a redesign. When a logo is too generic or too complicated, it is usually bad. Thus, the main rule that applies to all industries is that a strong logo design must be able to adapt in order to ensure a business can keep its best face forward as all manner of change inevitably takes place not only in the world of design but in society too.

No Copy-Paste, please !

By Rania Sakhi

This blog post’s topic is something we have been deeply discussing with my lovely teammates, Olivia and Soojin, when working on our logo proposals to make sure that we don’t fall into it. As a first step in understanding the project briefs, we started the creative process by researching and collecting visual references. Now once the work was done, with all the inspiration gathered in front of our eyes, we were blocked, for fear of falling into plagiarism. This is because, sometimes, the distinction between inspiration and plagiarism can be subtle.

Hence, in this post, I want to draw the distinction between these two key concepts.

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, plagiarism is the infringement of the intellectual property of others (1). It usually occurs when people present a creation as their own when it is not. It is very simple: if I steal or copy someone else’s work and intentionally appropriate it to myself, I am committing plagiarism, and that is reprehensible. Plagiarism can take any form, but in the context of graphic design and our class Yes Logo, it is specifically about visual plagiarism whether it is drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, advertisements, logos, brand names, or any other visual imagery (2).

Inspiration on the other hand is a creative process that is both unconscious and natural. I believe that getting inspired by a work does not necessarily mean plagiarizing it as long as it is not a pure copy-paste of it. Inspiration is truly in human nature, whether we like it or not. After all, when thinking deeply about it, learning is nothing but copying.

Now while some instances of plagiarism are obvious, intentional, and indefensible, others are simply impossible to accuse since they are either riding on a popular trend or simply using a tried-and-true formula. This is especially important since a creator might easily “copy” unintentionally and without even realizing it by stealing ideas he believed were his but had seen someplace else, possibly years earlier.

One less obvious example is these two billboard advertisements that ran during the Ramadan season. The plates on the billboards seem empty throughout the day. When the sun goes down, the supper eaten by Muslims at the end of each day’s fast appears magically. It is the same innovative concept but the main difference here is that the second and most recent one is a digital billboard, whereas the first was created using special ink.

**THE CREATIVE** Isla Délice “Ramadan” – 2014 Eurobest Finalist, EFFIE Awards SILVER Agency : Hérézie, Paris (France)

**THE LESS CREATIVE**
Tesco “Together this Ramadan”–2022
Agency: BBH London (United Kingdom)

Do you think this is a coincidence or a copy-paste? To me, it is a scary lookalike, to say the least.

An example that is too obvious is Pepsi’s logo and Obama’s campaign in 2008 which look very similar in terms of colors, shape, and design in a certain kind of way. Red, white and blue became Pepsi’s colors during World War 2, to show support for America. Yay. And the round shape, well that’s unchanged. It’s the design within the circle that’s an issue, seemingly. And, the sense I got was that Pepsi maybe wanted to follow this design approach to perhaps sell more sodas.

When asked about the company’s position on the whole logo situation, Frank Cooper, Pepsi’s portfolio brands VP, shared that optimism, change, and hope are all part of the Pepsi mantra. Thus the resemblance between the logos (3). But at the end of the day, the happy coincidence might appear to be acceptable because Pepsi did admit that they share the same optimism as Obama. Yet, is there anything really wrong with that other than a lack of originality?

To put it in a nutshell, it is certainly feasible to be inspired without plagiarizing, as long as you agree that recycling an existing concept is not always plagiarism. The creator’s method is thus centered on recycling and mixing existing pieces to create something new, spotlighting an underutilized notion that is open to human evaluation and appropriate reinterpretation. Finally, inspiration is the approximate reworking of an idea, concept, or substance that we have reinterpreted in our own unique way. Sometimes, it is quite difficult to determine who even initiated something. Even if you do identify the source, how do you know they themselves weren’t influenced by something they were unaware of? Maybe they’re just concealing their source too which swiftly devolves us into a chicken-egg discussion.

Now, what are your thoughts on this? Is anything original and creative anymore? I would love to hear your opinions on the topic of inspiration/plagiarism.

References:

ضائعون in Arabization

By Rania Sakhi

I went to Abu Dhabi mall last week for the opening of Forever 21 and its Arabic logo immediately got me thinking about our class Yes Logo and our multiple discussions about the Arabization of brands in the Middle East.

Forever 21’s new store in Abu Dhabi Mall

I understand that part of their marketing strategy through Arabization is to connect and relate with the Arab audience whether it is in the food, apparel, or beauty and cosmetics industry. Nevertheless, I believe it is truly essential that every brand takes time to figure out how to Arabize their logo to be effective in the region and appeal to the Arab customer. For someone whose Arabic is the first language, my mind froze for a minute trying to figure out what the Arabic logo said. Not only are the letters disproportionately made, but the font used is also very different from its English version. Hence, when attempting to Arabize, it is important that the logo or at least the name are done in a way that is both easy to read in Arabic and maintains the overall theme and colors that the brand has in English. In this post, I want to share my modest thoughts about the Arabization of some of my favorite brands and discuss whether they have done a great job at localizing their logos in an easy-to-read format or if their attempts went wrong.

Let’s start with the not-so-good-looking logos. I have 2 examples: the first one is the famous Dior logo and the second one is the late-night fast food sponsor of all NYUAD students, KFC.

This is the Arabic #Dior logo. Who designs these? @arabictype #designFail #arabicLogos pic.twitter.com/QX6zixF6vk

— Rania Baltagi (@labolts) January 4, 2014

When looking at the Dior combination, it is clear that whoever designed the logo wanted to match the Arabic and English design layout and forced it too much. The Arabic letters “د” and “و” are literally just remodeled to match the “D” and the “o” from the English version. At first, I found the idea to be very creative and original. However, when actually thinking deeply about it, I feel like the aesthetic of the Arabic version lost its value because the letters ended up having weird oversized forms to try and reflect the original. The logo simply looks very cheap and not luxurious at all. In this case, the accurate Arabic letter shapes are simply sacrificed for the purpose of aesthetics, and aesthetics don’t even look that great.

Dior store at the Galleria Mall

Gucci store at the Marina Mall

Similar to what Dior did, Gucci designed its Arabic logo to match its English version at the expense of the language. The Arabic wordmark is not even spelled correctly in itself as the ش is incomplete and the و looks dysmorphic.

The second example is KFC, which stands for “Kentucky Fried Chicken”. In Arabic, it should translate to “دجاج كنتاكي المقلي “. However, the Arabic logo only has دجاج كنتاكي (Kentucky Chicken) in it. This in itself is very problematic because not only is the translation not correct, but the Arabic logo includes the full two words and not just the abbreviation.

Keeping the full name is a wise decision as it appeals more and better to the Arabic reader, however, there is usually no balance between the two languages when it comes to space, whether it’s in their restaurants or products.

Now, I will move on to the successful Arabization of logos.

The first one is of the casual dining American Chinese restaurant, P. F. Chang’s. Its Arabic logo is in my opinion a great example of logo Arabization. With the same forms maintained, the adaptation of the Arabic logo is done fairly well as it doesn’t pose the same issues other logos mentioned above face such as changes in width or thickness, serifs, and calligraphic styles.

P.F Chang’s restaurant in Yas Mall

They did a particularly phenomenal job on getting the Arabic version of their logo just right. What I found cool and interesting is also the way they were able to get the G with غ and F with ا letters in respectively English and Arabic to look so similar. Furthermore, both logos are just awesome examples of what happens when 3 different cultures collide.

Another great example is Bloomingdale’s. Its logo simply shows how the Arabic calligraphy typeface is truly chosen to complement the English, making both versions work in beautiful harmony.

Last but not least is the logo of la RAM or Royal Air Maroc, the Moroccan national carrier. In my opinion, its design succeeded in merging Arabic and English/French where none are made to copy or mirror the other and yet work beautifully well together. I love how the bilingual logotype shows the elegance of both scripts individually, merging together in one unified shape.

To put it in a nutshell, Arabization should be more about context and comprehension so that the logos get localized based on the locals’ ideology to connect with them on a personal level. Yet, when adapting a brand to Arabic, legibility should be the first factor to look at. In other words, a logo must still be clearly readable to the local audience. Moreover, its stylistic approach should look and feel like Arabic, to native or Arabic speakers. Forever 21’s Arabic logo doesn’t feel familiar for instance as it is far too distorted to be seen as a natural counterpart to the original.

Hermann Zapf, the famous German type designer and calligrapher once said:

“Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability. And this is the purpose of typography: The arrangement of design elements within a given structure should allow the reader to easily focus on the message, without slowing down the speed of his reading.”

Now my question to you is: What do you think about this Arabization of logos? Is it really necessary for big brands to invest in making a great logo in Arabic? Have you seen examples of poor adaptations of logos into Arabic or perhaps other languages?

I am now very excited to hear from you and particularly from Wissam Shawkat next week, especially when it comes to brand design development and Arabic logotypes.

PS: ضائعون translates to lost in English.

“Plume Bloom”: Logo Design Process

I have to say that making a logo is not a simple process but quite an enjoyable journey to follow. While studying away in New York, I designed more logos than I saw in Times Square. For one of my business classes, Experiential Learning Seminar: Fashion Industry: Creativity and Business, I had to come up with a business plan, design a brand and present it to investors at the end of the semester. Starting a brand from scratch was always an idea that excited me and was ready to do anything to hop on this new challenge. We were a group of 3 and my two teammates had no background knowledge in design at all. Thus, I had to do it all by myself.

The first step was to find a name for our brand. We chose “Plume Bloom”. Plume, French for feather, and symbol of strength and power. The business was a luxury shoe brand in which we create luxury fashion products targeted towards chic women and designed to empower them. These products included shoes and more specifically glamorous heels, exceptional bags, and high-end jewelry made essentially with feathers.

After understanding what the brand embodies and what our business’s goals are, we were able to know what kind of impression we want the brand to aim for and thus what the logo could look like. Because the brand is all about luxury, beauty, and passion, we wanted the logo to be simple yet elegant.

The next step was to start designing it. The first logo I worked on was a logo that consisted of text only, denoting the name of the brand, Plume Bloom.

First “Plume Bloom” Wordmark Logo.

Because we want the logo to be simple and chic, a wordmark logo seemed to be the perfect option. It only has our business name, no symbols, no slogan. However, when we thought about it, we felt like a monogram logo is a must. We are a luxury brand, and similarly to Louis Vuitton and Gucci, we would definitely need to have our monograms on our bags, jewelry, and probably heels as well. Thus, we created a monogram logo of plume bloom’s initials: PB.

First “Plume Bloom” Symbol Logo.

Since Plume Bloom was going to be a new brand in the market, we needed the logo to be easily recognizable. To build name recognition, we opted for a combination logo: our wordmark and symbol logo. In fact, this type of logo is what allows the brand to be easily noticeable because it uses two design elements that represent the brand, together. Plus, they can be used separately when needed.

Combination Logo.

When it comes to color, black and white were our go-to considering that these colors are associated with power and sophistication, exactly what we wanted our brand’s vibe to evocate: elegance.

Okay, now that we’re done with designing the logo? What comes next? Market research? SWOT Analysis? Financial plan?

I personally couldn’t start working on anything else because I was not satisfied with the logo. I asked myself questions such as: what if one day we have to advertise the brand on a billboard in Times Square? Would it appeal to people? The answer was obviously a NO. The logo looked too basic and dull to me. Something was missing. The next step was hence redesigning the logo. I knew that the font we used was not the best. It is simple and elegant, but doesn’t match the brand’s vision. I played with shapes and fonts a lot and ended up choosing Gotham and positioned the P in the symbol logo upside down.

Second Logo Attempt.

At this stage, I was quite satisfied with the outcome. Nevertheless, when presenting our first pitch deck in class, the professor thought that the P was a “d” and wanted us to change it. I did not pay attention to that at first and thought it was very obvious that it was a P, but it was actually only obvious to me and my teammates. Once mentioned by different people, I just couldn’t unsee it anymore. Next step: play with the logo again. Do we keep it simple and clear?

Third Logo Attempt.

The first idea that came to mind was to keep the P and B initials and mirror them. And guess what? I loved it and we ended up choosing this option as our final logo.

Final “Plume Bloom” Logo.

Now what I learned from this whole experience is to test, test and test. Designing a logo is not the simplest thing to do, but the most enjoyable part of designing a brand. It is also the most important aspect of the business. Next comes prototyping, designing the shoes, writing a business plan, and finally manufacturing the products.

Similar to designing a logo, designing the shoe heel took some time. It took us months sketching and sketching. After multiple iterations, questions, and feedback from friends and family, we wanted to bring our own idea and vision to life. The shoe that we ended up designing was a black velvet feather heel with crystallized embellishment, glitter, and beaded details to appear across styles poised upon the brand’s signature feather-based heel.

Heel Design Sketches.

Final Heel Design.

We were very fortunate to find a manufacturing studio in Brooklyn that brought our simple sketch to real life. We went on textile, feather, and crystal hunting and found all that we needed in a shop in Manhattan. The final result was outstanding.

Final Product.

Plume Bloom : Made in New York City.

When it comes to logo design, being our main focus in this class, I believe that each aspect of a logo can affect the kind of impression it makes on the viewer generally and the customers specifically in the context of business, including colors, shapes, fonts, sizes, shapes. Although at the end of the day my logo may not resonate with every single viewer, the whole logo design process helped me at least bring the brand’s vision to life.

What I have learned from this class other than designing a brand and writing a business plan is that whatever work I do in my life, whether it is personal, for a class, or for someone else, I have to do it with lots of love and passion. Working on this project taught me patience and determination. I have developed a strong visual eye for detail that I can’t wait to implement in different projects of the YES LOGO class.