Tenchishido
visual identity
Tenchishido is a small martial arts club in Zaandam, run by a friend of mine. He asked me to take a look at their website.
I made the mark, the visual language and the website, and had some time left to refine them.
In the end the project was never rolled out - the club still runs on what it had before. What you see below is the result of my work.
the mark
The message inside the mark
The mark is two initials drawn as one thing. The sword, which also reads as the T of Tenchi, and the samurai banner, which is the S of Shido - two objects that travel together in this iconography anyway - folded into one mark. In the logotype the sword runs down the middle and splits the name into its two halves.
What was needed was a technical typeface. A little angular, a little sharp, a little mathematical, with a sense of movement, and with something Japanese in it. I took the Fuji typography as a starting point and began playing with it, to see what would come out - that is how designing works, looking for the shape. What mattered to me was that the shape of the letters themselves fitted the mark.
the site
At the centre of the site stands a samurai you can turn. Not a photograph, because in martial arts everything starts with distance - with how much space lies between two people and what can be done with it. The Japanese call that gap ma-ai, and it is the gap, not the technique, that settles a fight. That is why the figure is not lit here: there is no light source, no shadow thrown on the floor, and you still see the whole volume. The surface is dark because it is near and pale because it is far - the shape comes out of distance alone. Take hold of it and turn it, and the dark places cross to the other side: a shoulder that was almost black a moment ago pales and withdraws into the paper. The same thing is practised on the mat - distance is read by moving, not by looking from one spot. The menu orbits him on that same circle, so opening a page is a movement through that space rather than a click on a bar at the top.
