Context is everything.

Below you see five attempts at capture a newly-formed company’s essence for a business card. The company’s name is “Ichimi” which means chili pepper in japanese.

At then end of this entry, I will let you know what the client chose, and the nature of the company.

I’m going to ask you to look at these images and evaluate, solely on their appearance, what industry you would think they represent.

In this entry I explore the strategic use of imagery to convey the implied nature of an industry rather than having to explicitly spell it out.

At first glance this has an obvious connection with the name “ichimi” and the image of a chili pepper; this also incorporates the japanese spelling in hiragana. With these elements in place, this card becomes the ideal solution for a japanese themed restaurant.

This iteration capitalizes on the whimsical sounding name of the company. It also has a very organic feel with the rounded corners and the hand-drawn letters, not to mention the grass. This version while fun-loving lends itself to a nursery or a landscaping company.

The objective of this was to create a very modern, abstract look for this company. One direction the client provided me with is that he wanted a very clean look with a simple palette. Due to the abstract nature of this design it doesn’t explicitly imply a specific industry.

The idea behind this card was to create a stylized head of a girl, while still incorporating the simple color palette to create a combination of modern and fun-loving styles. Ultimately this card would be ideal for a hair salon.

This one uses the same image from above but strips the color from it, and puts it into a polaroid frame to create a look perfectly suitable for a modeling agency or a photographer.

Ultimately the client chose the modern/abstract card for his modeling agency rather than the last one with the polaroid frame because it more accurately represents his aesthetic and vision for his company.

I hope that this exercise will shed some light on both the brain-storming process in relation to design, and also the subjective nature of finding something that will work for you in your situation.