What’s with the Butta Logo?

“It’s beautiful but what is it? Is it a …?” Most people ask me looking at the logo with either a puzzled or a gleeful expression.

Butta’s logo has never been interpreted in the same way by people. Some people claim to see a face in it, others claim it’s just a pattern; some see an elephant and some even claim to see Lord Ganesha in it. Usually most of them try to find and trace out the letters of Butta in it. Over the course of these two years, ever since the inception of this logo, the interpretations have differed and so have the imaginations of people that go along with it.

Before I dive into more details about the logo, it is important to note that the current Butta’s logo is a revamp of a much older one, shown in the picture below.

The first version of the Butta logo was designed in 2013. The thought process that went along with it was rather simplistic one along with the requirements:
- It should have a Nepali lettering
- It should have some kind of design within it.

(One more requirement that was at the back of my head was that the color should be blueish-green, almost turquoise. And that’s it!)

The overall branding of Butta was focused towards a more doodle-art style. It was reflected in almost every branding material henceforth.

Coming back to the current logo, it was necessary for many reasons. First of all, Butta in itself was revamping from a hobby project within Threadpaints (2013) to a separate department within it (2015) and then on to a standalone brand (2016). The new feel of Butta needed to reflect that independence and growth throughout the years.

A lot of ideas were floating around on what Butta should be like and how Butta should function. Should it be a community of artists or should it just be a collection of designs? How will the overall idea be communicated? And even occasionally, is it even worth starting another t-shirt brand?

We stuck to the original idea that Butta should be a community-esque where artists with different art style could come together; Butta should be a place where these artists can thrive, communicate and sustain. It should be a place where aspiring artists can grown under influence of other artists. Any observer or user from the other end should see and feel the chaos of different art styles under a same roof yet find a peace in this mosaic. And if this observer should ever want to cross over to this chaotic side, (s)he should be able to do that with ease.

To be honest, we didn’t think of all this while creating the logo but the overall ideology was always ingrained in it.

We wanted to create a logo which could fit the basic requirements of that time, a flexible logo that could work across every platform. The rest of the requirements weirdly remained the same. Stubborn, eh?

• It should have Nepali lettering (as well)
• It should be some kind of design within it (like a puzzle to show different style coming together)
• And it should be yellow (but we went with lemon green later on)

We experimented with a lot of typefaces, patterns and even tried resurrecting the old logo. Along the way, we discovered a script called Tibetan Drusta. It is a decorative cursive script, usually used for artistic calligraphy. The script was perfect to reflect Butta as the entity we imagined. Hence, Butta’s current logo is heavily influenced from the script.

Coming back to seeing elephants and faces in the logo, we suppose that is the beauty of it. The interpretations depends from person-to-person like our perception of the world.

And that’s the beauty of the logo.