kailashblack
Design | Branding | Production
loading content...

A mobile-friendly version of this page is currently under construction.

In the meantime, please view this website on a desktop.

Reem Al Zahabi, which means "The Golden Gazelle" in Arabic, is a real estate firm based in the metropolitan Gulf state of Kuwait.

The CEO requested that the rebranding incorporate an illustration of a gazelle, to match the company name. I proposed that we use two versions: one with an illustration and one simple word mark, in order to have greater flexibility with scale, positioning, and print medium.

Both versions include the beautiful Arabic script, which contrasts nicely with the Fira Sans. In larger versions of the logo, Zapfino is used in place of Fira Sans.

After researching the gazelle's shape and appearance, I decided to focus the depiction on the animal's face. I also chose to restrict the logo to three colors, for easy printing. No gradients are used, and all colors are flat.

Click here or the button below to view the full-sized Brand Guidelines document.

Brand Guidelines
home > reem al zahabi > brand features

Whenever I develop a logo, I always design peripheral materials like stationery, business cards, and signage. Even if these aren't requested in the brief, I find it necessary to test how the logo might perform alongside blocks of text and other design elements.

In this case, these tests turned out to be worthwhile, as I discovered that many of the logo comps I developed simply couldn't work in the wild, even if they seemed fine by themselves.

The second image shown here is an example of this. Zapfino is an excellent font, and I felt it matched the Arabic script nicely, but it turned out to be far too loud alongside paragraphs, and it didn't work in all sizes. Fira Sans is more neutral and is easier to read at any scale.

home > reem al zahabi > logo in use

Kuwait is a small and wealthy country in the Arab Gulf. Its architecture is striking and memorable, and my first impulse was to incorporate it into the logo somehow. These comps of text alongside famous Kuwaiti buildings were not meant to be final (Reem Al Zahabi's real estate business didn't involve any of these buildings), but these were exercises I performed in order to find a good juxtapposition between the lettering and Kuwaiti architecture.

I eventually settled on Fira Sans. The slanted caps and eccentric styling of various letters, like the foot of the l and the tall lowercase i, are a great match for the skyline shown in behind this text.

For the gazelle illustration, I studied the facial features of gazelles and sketched them both freehand and with tracing paper. Their features, while pretty, didn't quite fit the look that I wanted, so I exagerated some features, like the eyes and ears, and muted some others, like the mouth and horns.

home > reem al zahabi > research and development