The many hues of being hueman
I like to brainstorm my posts before I get started with my writing. I think it’s a good way to collect my thoughts, my inspirations and set the tone for my piece and my mindset.
So I started with Rumi. I was drawn to his poetry–his messages.
“We are the night ocean filled with glints of light.
We are the space between the fish and the moon, while we sit here together.
Which one is with more, a crowd of thousands, or your own genuine solitude?
Freedom or the power over the entire nation?
A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.”
I love Rumi’s book, but it’s been years since I’ve plucked it off my shelves to be inspired by its pages.
However, this project with The Expanded Hueman brought me back to a familiar destination. You see, everything they do comes from a place of serendipity or synchronicity. It was a project that deeply moved me and connected with me on a spiritual level. The vision that this group of friends had really got me thinking about what it means to be a human being.
We’re All Made of Hues
The textbook definition of a hue is a color or shade, but it’s also been used to describe a character or aspect of one’s personality. Hues in color are created by dominant wavelengths, but every color is made up of the same components; hue, value and saturation. This is no different to how we can define humans, personalities and attitudes to life.
You see, we too are made up of different hues–no different to a rainbow. We color our personalities with hue, we have light and dark values, and we control our intensity through saturation. We are, by definition, huemans. By embodying these concepts of true wholeness through our mind, spirit and body, we can expand on these aspects and push ourselves across the spectrum to learn where our future personal development truly lies.
This is what it means to be a hueman–someone that is aware of all the variables that color our personalities and how we can individually control them to change the way we are perceived in the public eye.
The Many Hues of Your Brand Identity
People often think of brands as being a static, unchangeable thing. However, it’s far from the truth. Brands can change, adapt and alter themselves as needed. It’s as conceptually simple as changing your own hue and understanding that your business is a palette of gradients. That’s why many companies go through resigns, rebrands and ultimately restructure themselves. The hard part is establishing yourself in the beginning, finding a base palette to being with experimenting with different hues.
That’s why this project with The Expanded Hueman was so exciting. We didn’t start with just one or even three primary brand colors. In fact, the palette was a rainbow of gradients, each with their own personalities, history, and stories to tell. This was a far cry from my past work. It was an opportunity to learn something new, to start something different and alter the workflow process to be something unique, organic and expressive.
In short, it was a chance to break the rules!
There are many preconceived rules that we follow when it comes to brand design. Experts write books, they become outdated, then others echo those outdated sentiments and we end up stuck in a loop of unoriginality. I took the less-walked path with this project, forging my own path to stay consistent with the message that The Expanded Hueman wanted to portray.
Designing a Logo For Expansion
Unlike many of my past projects, designing the logo for The Expanded Hueman was a real scientific challenge full of inspirations, dreams and a touch of intuition. The logo fonts are custom-designed sans-serif fonts. They were inspired by a vision from Rhonda Smith and an intuitive hint from my own past experiences. Using this as a base, we continued to tweak the font until it surpassed all previous iterations. It needed to be special, it had to stand out and it needed to reflect The Expanded Hueman perfectly.
The icon itself was no different. We started with a vision of what we wanted, a hue that we had defined during the early brainstorming stages of the project. As time went on we allowed the hue to shift. Adapting to each of our gifts and our intuition, pouring our personal experiences and ideas into the project. While our first hypothesis was incorrect, we quickly reformed and used a different iteration as our base to once again build upon. If it didn’t look, feel or sound right, we changed it again.
At the end of a long creative process, we arrived at our new destination; an icon that consists of a bee and a rose. The expansion and growth of one’s brand, the pollination of new audiences, the spreading of ideas–these are concepts that are unanimous with both The Expanded Hueman and bees. It’s symbolic of the message that the company wants to spread. Bees are an icon of order, diligence, immortality and also collaboration. They’ve even associated with royalty, treating their leader as the Queen of their hive. The ancient Druids saw the bee as a symbol of the sun, the Goddess, community and celebration. It has a close relationship with The Expanded Hueman and their message, their ideas and their process.
On the other hand, the rose is a symbol of passion and perfection. It triggers thoughts of themes such as divinity, Goddesses, fertility, virginity, desire, secrecy and even beauty. It’s mysterious, yet drives us insanely curious due to its beauty and its patterns.
Your Identity as a Hueman
Huemans aren’t pre-defined, preconceived or manufactured. Huemans evolve, they adapt and their gradients shift as often as the winds. To truly expand your brand and personalize it, understanding the concepts of The Expanded Hueman and how we change to fit our surroundings can help you see things from a different perspective. See all the cute details here.