Overview
Project Scope: Bespoke Branding (Add-ons: Business Card, Catalog)
Tsukuru Society is a brand that takes its inspiration from Japan with the word "Tsukuru" translating to "Make" or "Create". Influenced by Japanese pop-culture and street style, Tsukuru Society incorporates a combination of kawaii ("cute") and kakkoii ("cool") into their everyday lifestyle products such as drinkware and stickers with chibi anime illustrations and cozy vaporwave aesthetics.
Creative Direction
Prior to this project, we've worked with Tsukuru Society on a lot of various one-off projects for almost half a year. Being a fairly new brand, Tsukuru Society started off with an illustrative logo and minimal framework for a visual identity that wasn't exactly functional, but worked for temporary purposes.
Ultimately, the brand needed more of a cohesive creative direction that would allow flexibility in making diverse products with various styles that may transition away from their current look and feel. This meant creating a brand design that didn't stray too far off from what they currently have, but worked well enough to be used in conjunction with their future product styles.
Branding Sheet
We designed a visual foundation for the brand based on: Japanese aesthetics, anime pop culture, cool street style, and cute chibi characters - attributes that the brand could expand into if not currently already.
The logo we designed incorporates bold, rounded strokes with subtle curls of the typeface - a balance between cute and bubbly, but clean and minimal. It's paired with the kanji writing of "tsukuru" to emphasize the Japanese aspect of it, followed with an asian-style cloud as the brand mark to iterate the meaning of "creation". We then tied all the elements together by curating and applying a color palette that is soft, playful, and inviting, but incorporates an edgier, more serious tone that has enough contrast.