In The Beginning
Wednesday August 20, 2008
On December 10th, 2007, 株式会社マジです [1] (kabushiki kaisha majides - aka, Majides, Inc.) was officially established. The month leading up to this date was spent signing paperwork, depositing the initial capital, and ordering a company seal, as required in Japan. But a name and legal entity weren’t going to do us much good without a memorable “visual stamp” - a brand logo. With the help of accomplished font and graphic designer Takayuki Yoshida, we had no fewer than 10 different logo variations to choose from.
Here are some of the runner-up logos:
At the time, prior commitments meant I wouldn’t be working under this name for a few more months so I had the luxury to be picky. Lucky for us, good logo designers like Yoshida-san know how to interpret a client’s expressions and create variations on a theme in the right direction, which ultimately cuts down on the tweak-feedback ping pong game designers and clients often engage in. (We’re also generally easy going, so that may have helped.) Now that we have meishis in hand embossed with the chosen logo, I wanted to share one meishi design we liked but didn’t go with, and reveal a few hidden meanings in our logo for our non-Japanese readers.
The meishi design we liked—but ultimately didn’t go with—looked something like this:
We liked how the card was in the “bubbly” shape of the logo outline and would therefore likely stand-out in a pile of business cards (not to mention the colors!). The two-color complement with its inverse on the reverse also gave the card extra impact, and the receiver was left holding the logo itself - not just a business card. But we just couldn’t get over the fact that the non-standard shape and aggressive colors made it look like a shop card. We did play around with a more standard card shape with rounded corners, which turned out like this:
In the end, we kept this latter card shape but shrunk the logo a bit as it seemed a bit over-bearing. We like how the cards would be exchanged in a vertical manner - common among more traditional Japanese businesses - and went with a more conservative color scheme, giving us this as our final business card design:
As you’ll see, this juxtaposition of conservative vs fun is a theme which runs throughout our identity.
Now let’s deconstruct the key parts of the logo for those not familiar with the Japanese language. (For detailed information about the Japanese language, this Wikipedia entry is a good start). Let’s start with a brief explanation about what Majides means.
What does マジです (majides) mean?
The literal translation for マジ (maji) is “serious”. です (desu) is a linking verb (also known as a copula), and in this case means “to be” or more accurately “we are”. So マジです literally translates to “we are serious”. That’s the brief academic explanation. If you walk around Shibuya or sit next to a group of chatty girls on a train and eavesdrop on a conversation, you’ll probably here someone exclaim マジで？！(majide?!) - which in the context of surprise would translate to “no way?!“ You’ll hear this phrase very often throughout Japan, on par with the へぇ〜 (he) from “Hey! Spring of Trivia” (show excerpt). Usually the conversation continues with an explanation for said surprising remark. What you’ll rarely hear in response is the expression マジです！, or “way!“, as the question itself is rhetorical.
Up until the recent past few Japanese starting a company would consider naming it after an expression. You see this more often in the U.S. - Yahoo! is probably the most well-known example of a tongue-in-cheek corporate name, and arguably launched the Internet / web2.0 name-craze that’s brought Yelp, Zazzle, and plenty others. マじです is our tongue-in-cheek response to the often bland Japanese corporate and salaryman culture.
The Logo - a brief deconstruction in three layers
Perhaps the most ingenious part of the Majides logo is the placement of 「です」(desu). In the Japanese syllabic alphabets (hiragana and katakana), some of the characters can be phonetically modified with a selection of “accents” paired with the character. For example, there is the neutral は (ha), but when paired with a tiny circle, or handakuten ( ゜) or a double-quote-like punctuation mark, called a dakuten ( ゛), the phoneme becomes ぱ (pa) and ば (ba). In the case of Majides, written マジです in Japanese, the root is マジ, where we have a dakuten (゛) on the シ (shi). So you’ll notice in the logo the 「です」is situated to be the dakuten. The で and す characters have themselves become part of another character! Recursion!
Let’s peel another layer. What if a reader doesn’t get it? What if they don’t see how the です is an embedded part of the previous character? They’ll probably just read the logo as マシです (mashidesu), which itself means “better” or “preferable” - another definition we’re fine with. So a serious person with little sense of humor might see the logo and think the company has an ego, and a light-hearted person with a sense of humor would see the logo and catch the irony.
Oh but wait! There’s a third layer of meaning. Logo designers must consider all manner of visual environments in which the logo may appear, especially changes in size. If text in a logo becomes too small to read, will it still retain its meaning? As you shrink the Majides logo - say to the size of a favicon - the part which quickly becomes illegible is the です. We believe that’s okay. Because です acts as a linking verb, some consider it strange that it’s actually part of the name itself. When most Japanese hear the name “Majides”, they’re very likely to think the name is just “Maji”. But in fact「マジです」being a company name is a pronoun, so the grammatically correct way we would introduce ourselves would be to say マジですです (majides-desu). Recursion again! And in the case of a tiny version of our logo, that’s okay! Readers will see 「マジ」, append their own 「です」, and ultimately arrive at the full name - マジです.
Which is all just a long way to say that we’re ready for some serious fun!
[1] If you’re seeing garbage characters, it may be because your browser isn’t using a compatible font-set or is rendering this page through a different encoding. Try setting the page encoding to UTF-8.
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