Founded by long-time friend and collaborator, the energetic and effervescent Brandie Janow, Kingdom Creatives is her solo community venture for helping transform and elevate the creative industries in Saudi Arabia.
In Saudi, appearance is everything - and after much toil and preparation in getting things up and running, Brandie really wanted to make a bit of a splash with her brand identity, so she asked me to take a look.
Approach
It's always a bit difficult designing something for people you know well. Fortunately, I've built up a lot of creative credit with Brandie over the years - we share a mutual trust and appreciation for each others work that borders on reverence!
So, we sat down for a coffee together and spoke about her goals and aspirations for her brand, and really tried to refine and narrow-down who she wanted to reach, what she wanted to say, and how she wanted to say it.
A unique perspective
One of the things I try to do in brand design projects is to look for a metaphor (rather than just do something obvious and formulaic) that I can mould into some sort of symbol or visual representation of the brand.
In our conversations together about the brand, we'd hit upon this idea that what makes creative people the way they are is simply that they see the world differently from everyone else.
This to me seemed perfect for Kingdom Creatives, and so I set to work exploring ways to capture 'seeing the world differently' in a logo design.
"Artists and designers see the world differently - they see things other people don't see"
Almost by accident - not uncommon in the creative process - I stumbled into clarity by noticing the negative space between the capitalised initials KC, and boom! - there is was.
I guess in the end it wasn't so much seeing the world differently, rather seeing things other people don't see.
Neat and tidy
Both Brandie and I fortunately share an appreciation for minimalist and concise design systems, so it was obvious that the Kingdom Creatives identity system would be an orderly, almost barebones style, with crisp, clean typography, neat and tidy grid, and even spacing with room to let everything breeeeath.
However, we did spice things up a tad with some bold and daring accent colours to help break the uniformity just a little bit. But before Brandie could get too excited and carried away, I added strict rules in the identity guidelines about how they should be used.
Anyway, the result is a solid, timeless and beautiful brand design that captures attention, sets Brandie and Kingdom Creatives way above anything her local competitors have, and generally adds some polish to her appearance and communications that sits perfectly with her audiences.
