About the Logo
A note from the designer responsible for the EARTH logo and symbol.
EARTH logo concepts
Integration
Sphere, circle, roundness
A gentle impression
A symbol of life, the fertilised egg
A resemblance between the self and the Earth; the Earth rotating around its axis
The making of the logo
As I listened to the story of EARTH’s projects, I kept thinking of Hayao Kawai’s ‘maternal principle’. From there, I brought the ideas of holding, co-existence and cycles into the concepts above, and created the symbol and logo.
The symbol
The mark contains many possible images: the Earth, a heart, a lower-case e and a smile.
Earth → from the organisation’s name, EARTH. It is designed to look like a simplified drawing of the planet.
Heart → because moving the final H of EARTH to the front gives HEART. We also felt that love creates life, and that life cannot sustain itself without love; this connected naturally with the logo concepts.
Lower-case e → from the first letter of EARTH. We also hoped that a smile might be read within it.
By leaving room for imagination, we hope each viewer will find something different through their own sensibility, opening a new form of communication. To convey the proposed logo’s impression without excess or omission, every element is made from circles: several circles are held within one larger circle. We also incorporated the feeling of family crests—Ken-hitotsu Katabami, Maru-ni Chigai Tomoe and Yatsugata Karigane—so that a subtle sense of Japan might be felt unconsciously.
The logotype
No existing typeface was used for the logo; every letter was designed from scratch. All the characters are formed by circles connecting with one another. The symbol at the upper right of the final letter is a planetary sign, a playful reference to the ® and © marks often placed after a logo. I felt that branding in Himeji’s companies and organisations could lean too heavily towards a classical tone, so I balanced that through the family-crest elements in the symbol. For the logotype, I added more straight lines to create a slightly futuristic impression, while softening the overall rigidity through circular forms.
Text by ABE, Jinichiro (WHEEL HEAD.Q.)