CaptivatingRomania

It all started on the back of a napkin.

After some initial ideas, the logo took shape with the help of two very talented designers: Mircea Dragoi, and then Max Marele, evolving through lots and lots of iterations.

Mircea excels when it comes to illustration, probably one of the most talented people we know in Romania, and Max he’s definitely one of the most talented online designers, focused on simplicity and typography. Us?, well - we “know what we want”. Our desire was not to create a brand this time - or at least not intentionally - we simply wanted a representation, a logo which communicates the name quickly and ideally has something “to do” with Romania in it.

The final result was more of an accident, but the choice achieves our goals well - the simplicity plus it contains national symbol - the colours of the Romanian flag.

- To begin with, we started with a basic mind mapping process

created with MindJet Manager

We then took the original ideas and went into more detail, trying to illustrate the “Captivating” word. From the verb “to captivate” we derived “to shine” and therefore the first trials tried to capture a “sparkle”, “a diamond”.

To captivate = to attract, magnet | to tempt, to shine (diamond, sparkle)

Various trials related to symbolism.
Here we did our best to find symbols which are representative of Romania and which can communicate an idea instantly, for both the locals and people outside Romania. A lot of these ideas were focused around the pieces of art created by Constantin Brancusi and the Monasteries from Moldova.

The Sphinx, The Endless Column, Bird in flight, the Monasteries, Arc de Triumph

Romania - Infinitely beautiful.
This option had its origins in the “Endless Column” (english for: Coloana Infinitului) created by Brancusi, but we had to drop it due to the height of the logo, which made it more difficult in terms of online applicability. We also tried other symbols such as “Bird in flight” etc, but these were not really conveying much to an outsider.

Note another idea: Romania: small with a big heart...

The old communist icon.
Another fairly brave trial was to get some inspiration from the old communism icon which was present on the Romanian flags prior to 1999. It did have some good ideas, but its execution was poor. This gave us some food for thought and we experimented with a variety of symbols (the seaside, the mountains, the sun, art) all combined into a single entity.

the Three-coloured flag is omnipresent...

Ribbons / waves + the colours of our flag + Explorra = CaptivatingROMANIA.
More iterations were presented in an attempt to simplify the logo and we tried lots of textures in the shape of the Romanian borders. However, in the end, we went back to the three colours idea (which represents the national flag) because we felt the name should be a lot more prominent and readable (captivatingRomania is quite long as it is), and we could just add a splash of colour. At the same time we were working on the design of another logo (Explorra.com) and we realised that its symbol was probably better suited for CaptivatingRomania. CaptivatingRomania tries to capture your attention through beautiful photography taken in Romania, through our own and yours lens, through what we find captivating.

ultimii pasi...

…a Captivating Logo hey? : - )