Fudo.
Fudo, is an apparel project that focuses on creating quality casual wear. The brand ethic is to keep going at all costs. To weather the storm.
The idea is to create garments that provide the comfort and inspire the confidence to deal with any occasion, in any environment.
The Japanese characters (kanji) that formulate a part of the brand identity read, ‘Fudo’. There are two characters, Fu and Do. The upper, Fu can simply be translated to ‘Not’ And the lower, Do, simply ‘Move’ However, there is a more profound and spiritual meaning to these characters both singularly and when brought together.
Fudo – Immovable
The mission is to create a clothing label of ‘substance’
Follow the journey..
The logo for Fudo Apparel has been finalised.
After much sketching, hand rendering of type and playing around digitally with fonts in Adobe Illustrator, I decided to use a typeface that I found while out on a font finding mission on the internet. The font, which was created by Typodermic fonts, immediately took me back to my graphic design days at Stockport College back in the 90s when, graphic design still felt very authentic.
(More on authentic graphic design in a later post)
I immediately fell in love with the font, which was provided in a bold, condensed format. I chose to squash the word a little vertically and play around with the kerning, so that the four letters, which represent two separate kanji, could be joined as pairs – each pair sort of becoming a horizontal Romaji Kanji! For some other reasons, I felt that I needed to link the two pieces of type together somehow, so I chose a symbol that I had rendered in Illustrator some years ago for an old project. Bringing it across to the Fudo project made perfect sense and once I laid it over my ‘Romanji’, it didn’t take long at all for it to find its final position.
Kanji – Logographic characters used to write the Japanese language.
Romaji – When English letters are used to write the Japanese language.
Romanji – An amalgamation of Kanji & Romaji. (Unofficial, of course)