The Logo Pt. 1
It needed to be recognizable, it also needed to be minimalistic and also contain the name in it at the same time, I didn't want the name to be separate from the logo design, it needed to be part of the visual identity.
I got my inspiration from other music labels like PPU, Aloha Got Soul, Rush Hour, Athens of the North, Be With Records, MCDE Records to name a few. They had the aestethic I was looking for, but it needed of course that personal touch. The Indonesian touch. I started looking up batik patterns and messing around with that in Illustrator. For me it was almost there, but it didn't feel complete. There was too much happening and was not minimalistic enough (1).
From there on I picked a little part of the pattern which caught my eye. The pattern is supposed to be a representation of waves. But in my head there were also a bunch of vinyl stacked on each other (2). So I went looking for a minimalistic rendition of a record and came across the rainbow-like figure you see on the right.
With this graphic I started to play in photoshop and made this design (3.). I was pretty happy with the result. I started using it as a background on my phone to get used to it. But something kept bothering me. It was still not minimalistic enough. Now I already had the basis down so it was only a matter of puzzling the pieces together.
In the back of my mind I still had a logo I really liked by the Good Design Awards. It's something I unintentionally see everyday at my job as a barista. Because it's on the Hario V60 coffee brewer. A shame they had to put the name underneath the logo, at least on the sticker. Something I wanted to avoid.
Later on when I was designing the logo I found out I unintentionally split the name Jiwa Jiwa in two, by making the top half white, and the bottom half red. Maybe the reason for this is because of my soul (jiwa) is split in two.
The Indonesian culture on my fathers side, and the Dutch on my mothers side.
The logo started to take shape and it went through these transformations (6.).
First I made it extremely basic from the point where I started to feel happy about the logo. Then I added the lines again and decided that was better as a whole.
It made the logo a full circle again and more recognizable. Then I started to play with the color, first black and then I tried the color of the Indonesian flag (Bendera Merah-Putih). But since I already did the red on top and white at the bottom I thought it already had enough reference to the national flag.
It needed to pop more so made it the brightest red there is digitally #ff0000.
But I didn't stop there. For a label that needs to breathe soul the logo looked a bit too sterile. So i took it over to my friend Tim Mastik, who has a spot in Rotterdam called MESHPRINTCLUB which is a community of mesh printers. In my next post I will show you how they work over there and the things we made.
