Typophile

Stepanavan - Armenian city branding

midbrain

This is a followup to an earlier post about selecting type for a city in Armenia that I am doing a logo/branding for. The logo will be on a map, brochures, web site and signage. It will also end up as the logo for the information center (with information center added). Target audience is primarily tourists, and the brochure will be in English/French/Armenian.

Biggest challenge for me is that I don't know Armenian at all, and am just working with letterforms. I originally did it in lower case, but that was rejected as apparently towns are written in all caps for ease of readability (see old version for a clear example of why!).

This version is Trajan Pro, small caps with larger capital. The Armenian letters are modified to fit in with Trajan from another face. The graphic is an iconic mountain of the area with a sun, all in the colors of the Armenian flag. The lettering is in green to help evoke an impression of naturalness (they have more trees than most of Armenia apparently).

Any and all comments welcome!

The old version for reference

raph

Definitely an improvement, but I think there's still room to do better.

AVA is kerned too tight. Even AN could probably be loosened a bit (and should certainly be more consistent with NA spacing).

I don't know Armenian letterforms well enough to comment expertly either, but there are a few things that bother me. For one, the cap U (s sound) has a very different weight distribution than the small-cap u-with tail (a sound). There are other color issues. For example, the last letter (n sound) is light, and the phi-letter (p sound) is dark.

The thin black rule between the two language versions doesn't give me a warm, fuzzy feeling either. Since you now have a graphic, maybe you could integrate that in so that it separates the two text slugs.

midbrain

Thanks for the comments. Interesting that you point out that the 'U' and lower case u with tail are of odd weight, because they are based on Trajan (just added the tail to the small cap version)...

I'm not in love with the horizontal rule either... Not too sure what to do there yet.

Captured from web.archive.org on 19 Oct 2013. view this capture