Branding Vara

7 min readFeb 18, 2020

“All the ideas that go into a designer’s work can never be fully articulated or explained.”

1. The Difficult Art of Naming

Naming is hard. Names, after all, are perhaps the most indelible artifacts of the product creation process. It seems so devilishly simple — all you really need is a word or two in a language you’ve probably been using your entire life.

But like any art form, naming benefits from rich tools and processes. And so we tried the method of association. How does it work?

“It often happens that a man cannot recall at the moment, but can search for what he wants and finds it . . . But he must seize hold of the starting point. For this reason some use places for the purposes of recollecting.

The reason for this is that men pass rapidly from one step to the next: for instance from white to air, from air to damp; after which one recollects autumn, supposing that one is trying to recollect that season.”

– Aristotle, De anima (The Art of Memory — F. A. Yates)

But what if we’re not sure what to look for? Then too, we begin by finding our “starting point”.

So we started by building our own word cloud by identifying feelings, functions and any other word that came to our minds when thinking of the product.

The second step was to find associations or simply put — to look where we never thought of looking before.

Creating associations with the feelings and functions from the Word Cloud; these led to abstract ideas from many fields that gave us a large resource to refer to — our starting point.

24 hours later, a magic wall with 15 different ideas popped up.

We selected our top three: Vara, Alva and Juniper. Finally, we did some desktop research and found out that Vara was the most unique option. It also won by popular vote.

So why Vara?

Short & simple — morpheme
Easy to pronounce
Not taken in the industry
Domain-ready
Winner by popular vote
Passes the crowded bar test

The gulf between an interesting topic and a workable proposal is sometimes vast.

2. Setting the Right Tone

“Integrity, honesty — those aren’t core values, those are values that everyone should have. But there have to be like three, five, six things that are unique to you. And you can probably think about this in your life. What is different about you, that every single other person, if you could only tell them three or four things, you would want them to know about you.”

How defining values and culture helped Airbnb achieve worldwide success

We did multiple brainstorming sessions to define our core values. Who are we? What makes us special? You’ll find that these answers aren’t very easy to find but once you find them they go on to become cornerstones of your brand.

Our values:

Reliable, trustworthy, innovative, high-impact, advantageous, beneficial, confident, strong, focussed, bold, striking, daring, audacious, state-of-the-art, research-oriented, living-on-the-edge (of technology), down to earth, real world usage, user-oriented, friendly, futuristic, balanced.

Our brand pillars:

Health
Balance
Precision
Integration
Network
Intelligent

2.1 The Logo Mark

We then went ahead and built ourselves a moodboard:

Initial sketching sessions are always fun. You never know where you’re going:

Then it starts to shape up a little more.

The best part of being a designer is when it finally comes together.

The final logo mark was balanced, bold and represented an integration — a unique augmentation between the human and the machine.

2.2 The Logo Type

Visual organisation plays a crucial role in any effort to receive or recover written information. The visual form of a text can serve as an aid to memory.

Of particular importance is the idea that typography provides an additional level of meaning and is essential to the visual memory of text.

The idea of text as memory is very strong. Here’s a fun example of how type can really make or break things. We often find that we recognise certain brand names quicker than others and and that we tend to memorise them faster. This is largely to do with the typography.

I tried out some of my favourite typefaces but quickly found that they didn’t quite fit with the logo mark or the brand aesthetics that we defined so far.

Then I stumbled upon Ulm Grotesk. I knew from the moment I laid my eyes on it, that it had to be the one.

A little about the typeface — Ulm Grotesk is a family of geometric-style fonts for use at display sizes. Its design is so simplified that it feels quite futuristic. The forms of the capital ‘A’, ‘V’, ‘W’, and ‘Y’ are reminiscent of the ‘worm logo’ that was used by NASA in the 1970s and ’80s.

The lowercase ‘m’, ’n’, ‘r’, and ‘u’ are spurless.

The high-modernist geometric style of the ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’ call Paul Rand’s iconic ABC logo to mind.

The fonts are the work of the Paris-based type designer Ilya Naumoff.

Primary Typeface: Gilroy — A modern sans serif with a geometric touch.

2.3 Colour Palette

“Man’s highly developed colour sense is a biological luxury — inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal.” — Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

The quote beautifully summarises what it means to be human — what makes us so special, and our sense of colour is one such quirk.

A few days before I started working on this project, I came across James Turrell’s installation piece “Aural” at the Jewish Museum here in Berlin.

I was immediately blown away by the remarkable effect colour has on us.

“I once saw an exhibition composed of several tunnels made out of a semitransparent material, and each tunnel was flooded with coloured light. I hadn’t realised the profound physical reaction the body has to colour until I walked into the cavern of the red tube and a feeling of warmth engulfed me. Imagine not being able to see any horizon, your eyes completely full of colour . . . There are subconscious responses to colour within specific contextual spaces.”

Colour sets the psychological tone of what one is trying to create.

The branding exercise was in many ways, a great learning experience. I had renewed faith in the various techniques and resources a designer has to rely on during this seemingly unstructured process. It can all be rather overwhelming when starting off but it is important to remember that the more time you spend on the details, the better the results finally are.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. — T. S. Elliot