Reflecting on Breathing Colour by designer Hella Jongerius at the Design Museum in July 2017

A Story of Design

The philosophy behind the embodiment design of a logo

Malek Jaber
Prototypr
Published in
3 min readNov 8, 2017

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I feel passionate about making the invisible, the unseen, visible. I leverage my feelings and intuition to visualize a perception of reality and the emerging future, what I sense, feel, and imagine. Often, an image appears way before words do. I express the image in the form of a visual conceptualization, as a way of communicating a perception to others. These images represent something that we embody, what we sense and feel around us, within us and through us.

To illustrate this, I will share the story behind the designing of the logo for Unleash Leadership, depicted below:

Unleash Leadership Logo — Designed in April 2017

The Three Circles— Founders and Foundation

Unleash Leadership was founded and hence embodied by three founders. It felt important to visualize this embodiment within the logo to represent our start-up.

The Primary Colours — Diversity and Culture

The primary colours represent the need for diversity of culture, education, experience, leadership styles, skills, generation, location, etc.

The Transparency — Alignment and Agreements

The transparency of the coloured circles symbolizes the opening through acts of authentic sharing to give a space where alignment and agreements can start to emerge.

The Intersection of Circles—Integration and Team

The intersection of circles represents a formed team. As the transparent coloured circles interlink, they symbolize the different ways that co-creation can manifest; just as combining the different amounts of primary colours together can make any colour. A team is more than the sum of its part.

The Triangle — Leadership, Followship and Mentorship

By its nature a triangle is resilient. The triangle represents the need for a stability in the form of natural leadership, followship and mentorship. Leadership is represented by the left quadrant of the triangle, leaders courageously bring an embodied intention inspired by nature, others and creativity. Followship is in the right quadrant, in which contributors who are curious and resonate with the leaders, use their skills to support the intention. Mentorship is in the lower quadrant, in which mentors guide with compassion and leverage their wisdom gained through past experiences.

The Balance — Natural Order

Balance is the natural state, not chaos or control. The universe is always trying to realign anything that falls out of balance. In other words, the universe purpose is a balance, a natural order, where nature’s imperfections are the universes’ manifestation to achieve balance.

Unleash Leadership Logo — Designed in April 2017

In the final composition, I brought together the components of the design in balance and harmony with one another, where the circles intersect one another in proportion to each other, and where the triangle sits at the intersection points of the circles.

What are your thoughts and reflections?

If you would like to share your reflections or questions, feel free to add them as a blog response below.

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