My wife, Stephanie, and I run a small family business called Ramirez & Co. (formerly Pelletier & Lo.) While our focus since 2022 has been on developing a successful muraling and design company, brand design and strategy are among the services we offer – on occasion – under the “Pelletier & Lo.” concern.

In mid-2021, we were hired by the Greater Austin Asian Chamber of Commerce to redesign their brand. With Stephanie heading our client services and me taking lead on design concept, we jumped into this challenging and fun project.

It is difficult to represent concepts of “Asia” or “Asian-ness” in a simple icon or logo. Asia is gigantic and represents cultures as diverse as Russia, Iran, India, China, Mongolia, and dozens of others (hundreds, depending on how you count). Because of this, during the project’s concept phase, we opted to present ideas separated from any single culture (or group of cultures) in favor of approaches that are somewhat more universally representative and that also play on the Chamber’s focus on Austin and Texas.

In this concept phase, we mostly focused on the “A” in the word “Asian” as our starting point while carefully integrating some specifically Asian motifs.

The client considered these designs and, with the input of their board of directors, asked us to develop a second series of options that reflected a more obvious Asian identity while retaining the focus on the capital “A.”

These second-round concepts made use of floral motifs such as the lotus flower and designs sourced from Japanese heraldry and traditional Maori carvings. As you can see, this is also the point at which we began introducing a color palette into the process.

While the client agreed that these approaches did reflect a more obviously Asian identity, they asked us to return to the very first concept we presented for continued development.

After several rounds of refinement, both in the logo design and in the color palette, the client settled on a final version of their new logo.

With a logo approach determined, we developed the Chamber’s full branding package, with a complete color palette, logo variants, web assets, print collateral designs, and more.

With a happy client and results that we found satisfying, this project was complete.