HAYLEY BLONSTEIN

Studio Nariiino (2022)

Ana Maiorino is a designer, artist, and friend who helped me with this exercise in client branding. With her input, I created Studio Nariiino as a conceptual brand identity through which she could share her creative work. The final project includes the basic elements of a brand identity, which can be expanded upon later should she want to make it operational.

Common themes of Ana’s work include the night sky and the ocean, and stylistically she is heavily inspired by Studio Ghibli. She specifically wanted to incorporate her star sign, Leo, into the identity, and the direction necessitated a simple yet playful set of logos that reflected Ana’s whimsical, relatable art style. I did this by selecting a thick, sans serif typeface with curves and round edges (New Hopes), and then by manually adjusting the kerning and leading. I overlapped “’Studio” with “Nariiino” and included a transparent stroke to show intentionality; to allude to her motifs, I rearranged the tittles of the i’s in reference to the constellation Leo, then replaced their shape with a more ambiguous form that can be interpreted as a star, sparkle, or both (see gif below). There is a primary and secondary version of this logo, optimized for vertical or horizontal space, and both are underscored by the same dark blue color—another reference to Ana’s motifs, tone, and style.