Visual Branding: House of Moves
When movement studios were a rare sight in a city like Chennai, Raymond Callanan, a prominent dancer in town, conceptualised the idea of creating a movement arts studio. He christened the name House of Moves and reached out to me to help him with the visual branding of his studio.
Research & Concept
Since movement arts studio were a newer idea in India and in Chennai, I had to work with a competitor analysis on a global level. On studying the other studio’s branding elements, there were majorly typography based, icon- based identities.
However, with the word ‘arts’ in the name of the brand, I wanted to bring about something artistic to the identity. Hence, settled to develop a combination mark for the visual identity.
A Study in movement by Wassily Kandisky and the Vitruvian Man by Da Vinci
Wassily Kandinsky's study on movement is an inspirationfor the logo. From the research we could pin-point on using silhouettes or outlines of dance movements in our logo. We wanted to confine the same in a shape- enabling the logo to signify the art of movement in a space- the HoM studio. We decided to work within a bounding box, not necessarily a circle or a square. We went a little out of the box and selected the hexagon- to be the bounding box for the logo. The shape that allows spectating a movement from multiple sides and corners.
The illustration of the Vitruvian man by DaVinci is a significance of the proportions of humans, hence we sketched from this. We used a main hip hop dance silhouette and we pasted more such movement styles, one behind the other in the logo and came to our on design of the Vitruvian man for HoM.
Type & Palette
Although the client hails from a Hip-Hop background we were not keen on using fonts that were brush lettering or inspired by graffitis. We finally chose a rounded sans serif open source free font- Moon.
A palette that is constantly in movement, easy to adapt to multiple collaterals and medium, as well as something that speaks flexibility and activity in basic black and white monochrome was chosen.
