If this whole challenge has been about learning, this week has definitely been a learning experience.
Throughout every logo challenge entry, I have done my best to approach the design as if a real company were approaching me to create a design for them. Some of them have been more light-hearted and fun (like last week's Inappropriate Fruit) and others have been more serious (like Unanimous Memorial).
But this one takes it to the next level for a couple reasons. First, I honestly don't know a lot about mosques. And second, because a mosque is directly associated to a religious idea, I have to be sure that I am both culturally appropriate and respectfully sensitive. So even before jumping into any design at all, before opening Adobe Illustrator, I have to do research.
We do have one other limiting factor: the word "wear". That word is directly tied to clothing, which should actually work to my advantage given that I know there is some expectation for garb within a mosque. Googling "what to wear in a mosque" returns a site called "Turkey Travel Planner". This site shares information for prospective tourists, including handy information on what to wear / what not to wear. We're off to a good start!
Here are the highlights I garnered from that site:
- Modesty is important in both genders
- Men have to wear long trousers and have to wear sleeved shirts
- Women have to have most of their body covered, including their heads
- You don't wear footwear in a mosque
So we can instantly rule out "Mosque Wear" being a footwear company. As far as body clothing goes, it seems like there isn't too much a need for a speciality store for mosque clothing... with the exception of one thing: the woman's head covering, also known as a hijab.
Back to Google. Being a man, I've never had to purchase a hijab, so I'm curious how one might go about getting one. I do fine one English-speaking online business (www.eastessence.com) that specializes in selling them.
The site is pretty modest, but I can't tell if that's on purpose or because they didn't put a lot of emphasis on the design of the site. East Essence does have a small logo, which is basically the letter "E" modeled to have a swooshy, flowery design traditional of Middle Eastern design. (I need to learn what that's called...) I'm not getting much from this site, so let's try another.
This next one, Unique Hijab, looks much more like a traditional women's fashion website. It's not overly flashy, but it does have the hallmarks of fashion site like posing models, clean serif fonts, and more. Unfortunately for me, they don't have a logo. It's just their name: Unique Hijab. That's fine for them, but I need more inspiration. Let's try again.
Our third stop brings us to TheHijabStore.com. This one is light and colorful and uses a simple, clean logo of an illustrated woman wearing a hijab. They don't seem to be as "high fashion" oriented as Unique Hijab was, but they do look like any modern business selling any article of clothing.
Google isn't returning anything a whole lot different,, so let's recap the points of what I saw amongst those three online hijab businesses:
- They exist. (Duh, that's a no brainer now, but I didn't know this 20 minutes ago.)
- While they all were indeed business appropriate, I didn't see any signals that showed particular sensitivity in any directions.
This is good news for me. It means that Mosque Wear can certainly be modeled as a hijab clothing vendor, and while I still want to be culturally appropriate, I have a little leeway with creativity.
But I don't want to stop with just hijab companies. In order to get a good idea of what I should do, it would probably be a good idea to look at what other Muslim focused companies do for their logos. Doing a Google search for "creating a Muslim logo" returns one of those sites that has pre-made shapes and stuff for you to build your own logo sans Adobe Illustrator. Here are some of the examples they used.
They're all pretty simple, clean, and elegant. Actually, they share a lot in common with most modern logos. But we have to keep in mind that this is a site that uses pre-made assets to build logos and isn't particularly reflective a built-from-scratch logo. To that end, let's see if I can find a logo like that.
Fortunately for me, this Design Bolts website compiles 30 different logos that do look built from scratch and exist for real companies. They're all really cool, so I've included a couple of them below.
One last time, let's analyze our findings in bullet form:
- There's a lot of detail involved. This isn't to say they aren't clean though, because they definitely are clean designs.
- A lot of them incorporate our traditional English alphabet as we know it along with the traditional Arabic alphabet.
Okay, I think we're finally ready to begin our logo!
Because I want the logo to have an effeminate feeling to it, I decide that I want to create a flower. The petals of the flower are easier to make than they look. I just create a basic circle, cut it in half, and tweak the anchor points some. Then copy + paste that to reform the flower back into the petal-like shape.
As far as the colors go, I actually really like the orange and blue from one of the logos used above, so I use those as my base. Thanks to the handy Color Guide within Adobe Illustrator, I find a nice, complementary purple and yellow color, too.
Much like the other logos shared above, I want to have the words "Mosque Wear" displayed in both English and Arabic. Let's start off of with the Arabic. Using Google Translate, I type the words in and generate the words in the screenshot below. Using Illustrator's "Auto Trace" feature, I can quickly pull out those words for later use in the design.
As far as the English words go, I want to find a font that complements the actual Arabic wording well. Fortunately for me, there are plenty of free fonts that do just that. After previewing them online, I end up going with a font that's called "Arabic Magic".
I could go into detail about how I built the rest of the logo, but I think it's pretty self-explanatory from this point. (Plus, my baby is wailing her head off!) I'm pretty happy with how the end product turned out. I think it's culturally appropriate, clean looking, and definitely gets the job done this week. Catch you guys in the next one.
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