Brand identity · Book design · Website
Vernacular Branding — Identity, Book & Website
Identity, hardcover book and website for Vernacular Branding: Reading Identity Through Design and Visibility, co-authored with Prof. Bhuleshwar Mate.
A book about India’s street lettering needed an identity that behaves like a street sign: direct, high-contrast, impossible to misread. Colour, weight and scale carry the meaning.
01 · Identity
The wordmark.
The wordmark pairs Poppins Light “vernacular” with Poppins Black “BRANDING”. The weight contrast is the identity, so it is never equalised: “vernacular” is always lowercase, “BRANDING” always uppercase.
The icon, interlocked letterforms that read as a “vb” monogram, works at small sizes such as favicons and avatars. The stamp is used at large scale on covers and event material, as a mark of presence rather than decoration.
02 · Colour & type
Blue, yellow, black, white.
Three primary colours, defined in CMYK for print. They appear across hand-painted signage in India, so their presence here is argumentative, not decorative. Yellow is never a background for long text.
Poppins carries the wordmark, headings, labels and navigation. Noto Sans carries body copy, chosen for wide language support across Indian and global scripts. Both are free via Google Fonts.
03 · The book
A tactile object.
A hardcover, 260 × 260 × 22.5 mm outside, with 254 × 254 mm pages on 170 gsm Indian Art Matte paper, and a gold-foil embossed cover. First edition, December 2025, printed by Pragati Offset in Hyderabad.
04 · Collateral
Cards, parcels, posts.
The guidelines extend the system into print: a blue business card, a book mailer with a blue sticker seal, a press kit, an event poster, a bookmark and an institutional gift certificate, plus social and LinkedIn visuals.
05 · Website
Two regions, two flows.
The website follows the book: a blue field, the yellow wordmark, and pages for the project, the authors, public reception, contributors and the press kit. India (₹) and Germany (€) each get their own purchase page, so the two sales channels are never mixed.
