Social Ryijy: Story of a Logo

Hi there!

It's Varvara here, the artist and the motion energy behind Social Ryijy art project that I recently introduced here on Vocal: Community's Ryijy.

Today's story will be on the logo created for the project by a beautiful human who has a long connection to the art project from the very early stages.

If you haven't read a story about the project, I'll give you a short version: Social Ryijy is a series of textile art canvases that capture people's stories in a form of their unique yarns. 1 human's story is represented by sent or described yarn on the canvas and the log in the journal. Together the stories make the colorful canvas of shared stories.

So far there are two physical/analogue canvases: one that tells my personal story of immigration ("Housewife-in-Residence" Ryijy) and one that tells stories of migration of other people ("Soical Fabric of Migration" Ryijy). And there is a digital textile canvas coming, the one that hopefully will make it possible to create space for many other canvases in the future.

When in 2016 I posted a call for people to share their migration stories and send or describe their yarn of migration, Nina was one of the humans who shared her story with me, she described her yarn and later on I picked one from donated yarns I got from AALTO University Textile lab.

The yarn and her story became a part of the shared canvas - Ryijy - together with her story written down in the journal.

We have been following each other on Instagram since then, but the project was on silent mode until 2020 when my relationships with programming started and I had a vision how the Social Ryijy can live in a digital world.

I posted a very shy post asking if anyone possibly wants to work together on a vision for the next steps of this project. And Nina was the one who took action right away! We were meeting almost every week since then brainstorming, discussing, developing the backbones of the new stage for Social Ryijy.

Nina is a graphic designer who loves fonts, she is humble about her talents and her work, I think she is much more than graphic designer. She gets the concept part right, she adds her vision, she listens and hears others, she is very sensitive to the society trends, to people emotions and personalities and she is amazing to work with.

When I asked her to describe herself for the Ryijy project, she wrote:

I'm a Siberian girl :) I have a PR-specialist education, but I'm a self-taught graphic designer. I studied psychology, social, marketing and communication sciences. I'm keen on philosophy and futurology, systems theory, and Inventive problem-solving theory.

I'm good at branding. My main job is to draw letters. I'm really excited about this. Also, I have illustrator's skills, making books skills, and so on. I have experience drawing landings, but that's not what inspires me. Once I discovered a photographer in myself. I like to take portraits in natural light.

I like to make creative concepts. I think I'm good at this. And I'm interested in analytics. Sometimes I feel some R&D in my mind.

Now I'm studying Art & Science at my hometown University. And I try to learn data science on my own because this is really cool skill. My guess is that my master's thesis (in 2022) will combine data science and art.

Nina has been the real gem for the project. And now to the logo part!

After the few brainstorm session on the umbrella name for the project, we pinned the Digital Ryijy for the digital part of the project, and Social Ryijy became the name for the both, analogue and digital, parts. But the concept was still too broad to make a direction for the logo development - the part of the project that Nina was ready to take over.

Then, on my birthday getaway - to meet sunset of my year and sunrise of a new one in a solitude - I took a bag of yarns, piece of white fabric and scissors - to brainstorm away from computers and agendas.

I wrote word "ryijy" with different yarns and left it to look at in the next morning.

I took pictures, left home, and sent it to Nina right away.

From there Nina's digital sketching part started:

We went through couple rounds of feedback and iterations until the logo was finalized for the use for our webpage-in-development, slack community, and other digital needs.

The logo have this continuous yarn feeling and its structure is visually connected to the textile's production techniques and the overall feel of the Ryijy's canvases. I also like how you get a feeling that there are two humans that are connected together in this logo, which makes it perfect for the idea that this art project is connecting people from all over the world through their shared stories.

Thank you, Nina, for volunteering your hours, your vision, your professionalism and creativity to make this logo possible and so great! ♥

Nina's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ninaa.zh/