Brand Identity-Metercube - JASINTH MANAYATH VADAKKAYIL

brand identity

for metercube

Design is creation, process and result of an idea. This page exhibits a glimpse of the process behind designing a brand identity for metercube.

Brand

Metercube is a furniture and home decor retail venture of real estate leader Sobha Limited, which addresses the fact that our lives revolve around the physical space that we call home. As the name suggests the cubic meter m³ is the unit of volume, hence the name metercube.

My Contribution

Designing the wordmark and icon for the brand, Defining guidelines, Branding various articles and store communication

Wordmark

in English

When introducing a new brand to the world, it’s always good to go with a wordmark logo. This helps to build brand recognition, as the audience will associate the business with the fonts and colours of your logo. Keeping in lowercase makes it more legible and compact bold characteristics will speak the confidence the brand withhold. The accents were also shortened to add to its compactness.

in Kannada

Being associated with in a state in India, the regional language is a norm to have. Even though I haven’t ever worked on Kannada language typefaces prior, making it look like from same family was needed. The stress in the typeface was taken similar to English and protruding descend was reduced in size without losing the overall visual balance.

Colours

While typeface is key with wordmark logos, colours shouldn’t be overlooked. A splash of colour can be the difference between a forgettable wordmark and one that stands out in people’s minds. Primarily we have used black and its variants. Brand directional colour is yellow which works as secondary, but sparingly used.

Why Yellow?

Inherited from mother brand

SOBHA as a brand is mature and follows a muted yellow in the brand logo. As a derivative and to address a young energetic brand metercube, brighter yellow was introduced into the system as an accent.

Attention grabber

Yellow is the most visible colour, it is also the most attention-getting colour. Yellow can be used in a certain amount to draw notice, such as on hoardings or advertisements.

Stand out in the market

There were few organised furniture and homeware retail players in the market who follow certain brand colours. The choice of an accentuating colour yellow was picked to be different from their’s.

Symbol

A cube can be graphically represented and interpreted in many ways. Making it look like a cube in ones imagination, but still not depicting it directly was the challenge. Before going further to designing an iconic symbol, making a wordmark and the brand placement in the market was elementary. Minimal but classy was the simple brief given to execute this task.

minimal+

monochrome+

mystery

formation of a cube between the interplay of light and shadow.

Being monochrome the change in direction of the light hitting on the cube still continue to project the shape of the cube in one’s imagination, hence making it work in either way, dark on light or vice-versa.

The viewing orientation and selected faces makes it an upward progressive arrow, denoting growth.

Custom Font

There were many instances where the wordmark, symbol and other custom icons need to be used across applications with ease. So I made a font called METERCUBE Essentials.otf. Having a font set with specific character keys assigned to them can help graphic designers, label makers use this for essential use without facing data loss.

Pattern

The cube symbol made synonymous with the brand name was created with several other intentions in mind. It can be used in multiple ways, including tessellations, key graphical shape, website icons, store visual merchandising etc.

Leaving critical areas, the concept was then left open to the team to experiment with their imaginations.