Vodori

Situation:

Our company needed a branding facelift. We wanted a look that accurately conveyed our company culture and work ethic, alongside our client relationships.

With the current state of the web advancing in both design and technology, we wanted to create a site that better reflected our capabilities as a company.

Solution:

Upon discussing the company’s history and current practices, we latched onto certain ideas and elements that we wanted to translate over into the new mark.

We set to work, keeping the following guidelines in mind:

• Our name is derived from Japanese culture, inspired by its calculated culture and focus on perfection. Odori is a Japanese traditional dance. The ‘V’ stands for virtual. Vodori = the virtual dance.
• Create an abstract mark that both represents our relationships with clients and displays our youth, agility, and liking to technology.
• Maintain enough elements from the previous branding to keep the transition smooth without deterring already established clients.

Color: Wanting to maintain the cultural theme, the team researched the meanings of multiple colors in Japanese culture. As a result, we selected orange. Its description fit ideally with the aesthetic of our company: orange represents energy, balance, warmth, enthusiasm, fun, and vitality. And it demands attention. It maintains the drama of our previous logo’s red, with the added cheer of yellow, and the color orange is often viewed as gregarious.

Typeface: Coming into the design, we wanted to keep the Bauhaus typeface to maintain our already established brand. We wanted to update the look without replacing it, which in turn lead to a light type weight. The new weight conveys a more contemporary and clean feeling that meshes well with the mark.

The Mark: The staff here commonly uses the term “Vodorian” when referring to one another.

This sparked the idea of portraying Vodori as if it were a country, which in turn led to the discovery that each municipality in Japan has its own flag.

These flags are usually bicolor, highly stylized geometric shapes that often incorporate Japanese characters.

The idea was to create our own unique mark that illustrates our relationships with our clients as well as our efficiency.

Our challenge was to create a logo which incorporated an abstract shape while retaining the ability to stand alone.

Scale: Upon deciding of the new font weight and mark treatment we had to establish a relationship between the two. We used the golden ratio to achieve a perfectly calculated scale of the mark in relation to the typeface. The use of the golden ratio was also applied to the marks placement in relation to the type.

Results:

The finalized logo embodies what our company represents through color, form, and function.

With the rollout of the new brand, the design team developed not only a brand spanking new website design, but all the other collateral—including, but not limited to:

• Powerpoint templates
• Business cards
• Letterhead
• Invoice sheets
• A dynamic new blog with increased functionality
• Tradeshow materials