Alai Ganuza

THE BRIEF
Alai Ganuza is a prolific fine artist and educator, with a huge social media following. She offers a fun and approachable way to learn painting, with her ethos being “better done than perfect”.

Alai was using her signature as her logo for a long time, but this didn’t scale well and didn’t work when embossed on material like certificates and gifts for her course participants and retreat members. Alai was looking to upgrade her branding with an artistic style, but with a design versatile enough to work in multiple different formats.

During our calls together, Alai and I came up with ways to represent her brand using themes around physics and colour theory. She is famous for painting mundane scenes (food, dirty dishes, etc), but with a twist of colour and light to make her scenes joyful. We would need to combine physics with imperfect artistry to create a truly unique mark.

THE SOLUTION
During my exploration of this mark, I explored many ways of combining light and colour to reveal a shape that reflected Alai’s passion. The idea to use a prism to represent physics/colour theory came quickly, but executing it was a real challenge.

Alai’s logo mark uses a technique called a ‘radar sweep’; a radial gradient flowing from colour to white. Using the hard edges of the gradient, masked with ‘imperfect’ paint marks, we can reveal the triangular prism in the centre.

Finally, I created a simple depiction of the design in one colour that could be used for embossing/stamping, along with a combination of the two styles (colour and outlined).

We spent a long time tweaking the typeface ‘Cinema Script’ into a style that paired well with the stroke widths of the outlined mark, and that felt similar to Alai’s handwriting (a nod to her original logo).

TESTIMONIAL

"James had a difficult task since my business has different sides and I needed to make them live under the same brand. James found the solution to the impossible task and delivered with extreme professionalism. Not only that, he guided me through the process to properly use it all.” - Alai Ganuza

SERVICES
Logo Design