"Ishara" means sign in Swahili, a name already set before we began. The brief was clear but not simple: colors calm enough to resonate with Deaf users, and a mark simple enough to be instantly recognizable, yet real enough to carry meaning. We went through several rounds before landing on a mark that reads as the letter "I," Ishara's first letter, while also functioning as an actual Kenya Sign Language gesture.
The company came to us with "Ishara" already chosen, sign in Swahili. That gave the identity work a clear north star from day one: whatever we designed had to live up to a name that was already doing half the job.
We went through multiple rounds of exploration before landing on the final logo, a form that reads first as the letter "I," but on a second look reveals itself as a real KSL sign. It had to work both ways: recognizable at a glance, meaningful up close.
The brief asked for colors that would resonate with Deaf users specifically, not just look good on a pitch deck. We built the palette around that constraint first, prioritizing calm over noise, before layering in the typography and pattern system that carries it across every touchpoint.
Kenya shaped more than the name. The geometric pattern running through Ishara's flyers and banners draws on African print traditions, bold, graphic, built from repeating shapes, reworked in Ishara's own color language rather than a literal reproduction. It's the piece that makes a flyer, a banner, any future material read as unmistakably Ishara, recognizable before you even reach the logo.
Once the mark, palette, and pattern were locked, we packaged all of it into the Ishara Brand Guide: logo usage and clear space, the full color system, typography, and the rules for how the pattern motif can — and can't — be applied. It's the reference that keeps every new flyer, banner, and product surface consistent as Ishara grows past this first rollout.
The pattern motif and palette carry straight off the screen and onto physical collateral — a roll-up banner for events, a flyer for outreach — without being reinvented for print. Same shapes, same color logic, same read, just resized for the room it's standing in.
The identity had to hold up in the product itself, not just on marketing collateral — same palette, same type, same pattern language, from a full desktop layout down to a single mobile screen. Including the 3D avatar Ishara uses to demonstrate signs, which needed its surrounding UI to feel just as calm and legible as everything else in the brand.
An identity that doesn't explain sign language. It uses it.
"I love how professional these slides are btw, clean and well structured. Worthy of a UI/UX company."