JJ Huus is a Swiss furniture design and manufacturing business based here in Taiwan. The owner, a delightful Swiss man named Juerg, is a veteran in all things design and furniture and has been supplying his European partners for decades out of Taiwan along with his wife, Jenny. Juerg and Jenny of course make up the ‘JJ’ in JJ Huus, with ‘Huus’ being ‘house’ in Swiss-German.
JJ Huus is a new business venture for them, whereby they will be designing and creating their own brand of furniture, as well as curating a range of living accessories. This will of course be heavily influenced by their passion for Swiss design – practicality, longevity, clean and simple lines, comfort and sustainability.
Juerg asked me to design a logo for JJ Huus, a wonderful honor when a designer asks another designer for their expertise. The brief included their business goals and principles as well as brands, logos and designs they like, which as you can imagine, were minimalistic with a ‘less is more’ approach. Fortunately these are virtues I’m already on board with!
The logo is clean, minimalistic and relevant to the business.
When getting stuck into this logo design there were a couple of things I needed to be wary of. The first one was not to do something too clichéd since we’re in the realm of ‘house’ and ‘furniture’ and general ‘home and living’ which has some very common icons that we see daily. However at the same time it is important to hit home (no pun intended) what JJ Huus is all about, at its core. I also wondered how well known it is (in Taiwan or anywhere in the world) that ‘huus’ is ‘house’ in Swiss-German (not too hard to figure out but still), thus making it more important to bring in the element of ‘house’ or ‘home’, but tread carefully not to make it look like a generic icon you might see on your computer.
The beautiful moment arrived when I worked out that the double J in the name can in fact make up the structure of the house - roof and eaves included - and so we get the word ‘JJ’ in the logo symbol, as well as an actual house. It could not be more concise.
Looks good in the home and kitchen
Sounds simple. But refining this down to its most minimal, yet legible, relevant style and form was challenging. A very nice and appropriate font, European of course, was added alongside the logo to help it with some elegance with what is a solid logo symbol on its own.
Equally impressive when used on a black background, giving it a bit more sophistication
The colour palette is inspired by the Swiss red, this being a more sophisticated and subdued red to help clarify the superiority of the brand and its products. The red is eye-catching and recognisable, especially for accents on the website. We also liked how this works fantastically well in just black and white, with a shade of grey thrown in. This will come in handy when branding takes a greater form.
Should they go into branding their own home accessories and utensils the logo icon will be prefect!
I’m happy to say that this logo design made Juerg very happy and he took to it immediately, a very satisfying moment for me knowing that such an experienced designer saw what I saw and loved it. Every logo I design comes with Brand Guidelines including fonts, colours, patterns, icons and rules.
