How the Aryxe Logo Was Created

After Stephan spent night after night researching Greek mythology, some favourites became apparent. However, they tended to be monsters with several heads or some kind of human-beast hybrids. After a long search and endless combinations, we created the artificial word Aryxe (even though there are creatures with similar names in certain fantasy novels, but only Star Wars geeks would know.) As far as the logo is concerned – it was supposed to be modern and classical at once, and we definitely wanted to avoid “non-logos”.

What are non-logos? When someone has a company or a rock band or whatever and simply thinks they must have a logo no matter what. The result is a non-logo. Aimlessly designed logo-like thingamabobs there must be millions of, simply because the prevailing mind set says that business cards and web pages would look naked without them — which is, of course, nonsense. Good lettering without a logo is so much better than slapping a non-logo on the stationary.

Once we decided that we wanted an owl for the logo (an important animal in Greek mythology that also stands for wisdom. Granted, it may have other meanings in Islamic culture but potential clients with Islamic background will just have to deal with it), the next idea was to abstract the owl’s head into polygons, especially triangles. This then resulted in an obsession with triangles, which we are now using everywhere from our stationery to the website and slides.

When it came to picking colours, it was clear to us early on that we would focus on black, green, and white, since pleasing green tones are the colours of the woods where after all, owls usually live. Shades of grey should be avoided in logos – they are difficult to print and especially difficult to combine with photo material in brochures and websites.