Brand identity · Icon systems · Nairobi
Identity work that survives the handover.
Brand identities, icon systems and the collateral that carries them, drawn in Nairobi for organisations working across Africa.
- AHK Growth Partners
- Aykana
- Catapult Nature
- Nura
01 · Selected work
Four identities, research to collateral.
Not logo files in a folder. Each of these shipped as a working system: the mark, the rules that keep it legible, and the documents a team actually needs on Monday morning.
02 · What I take on
From the first conversation to the last file.
01
Brand identity
Strategy, mark, colour, type and voice, written up as rules a team can keep without me in the room.
02
Rebrands
For organisations whose work has outgrown their look. The research decides the direction before anything is drawn.
03
Icon and illustration systems
Sets drawn from one rule, one stroke weight and one optical centre, shipped as clean vectors for web and product.
04
Editorial and print
Prospectuses, company profiles, catalogues and stationery, print-ready and on the same system as the screen.
05
Web design and build
Sites designed and built end to end on the identity’s own tokens, WordPress and WooCommerce included.
03 · How a project runs
The idea comes out of the research, not before it.
Step 1
Research
The competitors, the market, and the room the brand has to hold. For Aykana, six competitors were navy, geometric and decorated; the answer was monochrome and typographic.
Step 2
The idea
One sentence the whole system can be tested against. Aykana’s was “in a market of grey areas, deal in black and white.” If a decision does not serve the sentence, it goes.
Step 3
The system
Mark, colour, type, voice and motion, with the rules that keep them legible: what sits on which ground, and what never does.
Step 4
Applications and handover
The prospectus, the site, the stationery. A system is only real once it survives a document, so the work ends with the documents, not the logo.
04 · About
One pair of hands, start to finish.
I am Hany, a designer in Nairobi. I have spent ten years drawing interfaces and identities for products and organisations working across Africa, and the studio is where that work lives on its own.
The research, the drawing, the rules and the build all come from the same hand. Nothing is passed down a chain, so the reasoning behind a mark is still in the room when the site gets built.
Hany /ˈhʌ.ni/, said like honey
Have a brand in mind?
Tell me what it is for and who it has to convince. A few lines are enough to start.