Summary:
Visual identity creation project for Narayan massage therapy studio, creations of the business papers, illustrations and signage for the facade of the studio.
Process and conceptualization:
In initial contacts by email and phone, the partners have sent me the motivations of the project and explained how they had reached the name of the shop, which has been very important for the conception of the visual identity project. Below are some of the texts they have sent to me, and others from internet research results, which ones I have done:
“Narayan & Narayana
Narayan is an Indian name, of sanskrit origin, that means “man’s path”, meaning the search of knowledge, peace, wisdom, then, the Hindu ideals and of most of the religions we know. This spelling is a modern transcription of Narayana, the name in its original version, although ending in “ana”, a totally feminine ending for us in the Western world, Narayana is also masculine in India.”
“Narayana or Narayan is an important Sanskrit name for Vishnu (God responsible for maintaining the universe in Hiduism) and currently a common Hindu name.
The name Narayana is composed of ‘nara’ (human, man) and ‘ayana’ (eternal, endless, God). Tradition associates the component nara with a water meaning, indicating the characteristic that everything can permeate and making an analogy to an infinite ocean, where the ceaseless movement of birth, life and death of the cosmos occurs. Narayana, according to this etymology, is that which moves in the infinite waters and is also water itself.
This intimate association between Narayana and water explains its frequent characterisation in Hindu art as sitting on an ocean. Another translation of Narayana is ‘the supreme man, base of all men’. In another interpretation, the term ‘nara’ means ‘human’ and ‘ayana’, the ‘direction, goal’. Hence, Narayana refers to the ‘direction of man’.”
Based on this initial briefing, I have been directed myself towards some paths that would converge with the motivations they had been wanting. I have presented my research with about ten pages of reduced images, they have really liked the lines of reasoning and they have approved the visual concept of the “gyan mudra”, which is exactly the icon of the shop’s brand, where the index finger meets the thumb, meaning the encounter of man with God, I have immediately made them an analogy with Michelangelo’s work from the Sistine Chapel, where God, in the form of an older man almost touches his index finger on the finger of a man.
For this project, I have been working a lot on the paper before the execution of the job on the computer, I have made many sketches of the textual part and the icon (some are in the images above, others are in the images below of the text and others are not available here in this portfolio’s project), and with the Sanskrit references I have made as much as possible the spelling of the Indian letters in the written part of the brand.
Later, I have made a small folder and a poster (the folder is between the top images and on the bottom of the page), for which I have been creating some illustrations for the layout, female hands making the massage’s therapy on different ways, resulting on the images 1, 2 and 3.
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