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🍦 A playful identity built to make people smile
I’ve been exploring a visual identity for Scoops & Smiles, an ice cream shop built around one simple idea: ice cream should feel joyful.
Rather than stopping at a logo, I explored how that personality could become a complete and recognizable brand system — from the logo and color palette to supporting icons, illustrations, patterns, packaging and printed materials.
The goal was to create something that feels:
Playful • Friendly • Wholesome • Memorable
I particularly enjoyed exploring how the illustrated ice-cream characters and soft pastel palette could become recurring brand assets rather than simply decorative elements.
Now I’m curious about something:
If you were taking this identity further, what would you develop next?
Would you push the illustration system, refine the typography, introduce more packaging applications, or take the visual language in a completely different direction?
And for the designers here:
What makes a playful brand identity feel distinctive rather than simply “cute”?
I'd genuinely like to hear different perspectives.
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Designed across: Branding · Packaging · Visual Identity · Product Experience · Photography
A project where I fell in love with brand identity design. JUGNU has a piece of my heart.
The packaging turning into a board game might be the strongest branding decision here - the identity keeps working after the unboxing instead of ending up in the bin. Did the glow-in-the-dark clay come first, or did the firefly metaphor lead you to it?
Clayful Spirit - Brand Identity & Logo Design
Clayful Spirit is a Bangalore-based pottery studio built around the idea of shaping clay with intention and joy. They came to me needing a visual identity that felt as tactile and human as the craft itself - something that didn't look like a generic "handmade" brand, but actually captured the rhythm of hands on wet clay.
The concept
The core mark is a symbol that reads two ways at once - an abstract clay pot mid-throw on the wheel, and the ampersand-like curve of the number/letter "8," nodding to the infinite, looping motion of the potter's wheel. It's playful without losing craft-forward warmth, and simple enough to work as a stamp, an embosser, or a tiny favicon.
What I delivered
Primary logomark + wordmark lockup, paired with a custom hand-lettered logotype that mirrors the organic, slightly imperfect edges of thrown pottery
A flexible one-color mark that holds up in reverse (white on terracotta, red on cream) so it can live on packaging, clay stamps, and photography alike
A warm, earthy color direction (terracotta, clay red, cream) pulled directly from the studio's own materials
Real-world mockups against studio photography - raw clay, hands at work, pots on the wheel - to show how the mark behaves in-context, not just on a white background
Why it works
The mark was designed to disappear into the brand's own textures - sitting naturally on unglazed clay, catching studio light, holding up small on a hangtag or large on a shopfront. It gives Clayful Spirit a identity that feels less "designed" and more grown out of the craft itself.
Tools: Illustrator, Figma
Making the mark work as a physical clay stamp is the quiet constraint doing all the work here - relief printing kills thin strokes, so the fat one-color silhouette was probably decided for you. Have you pressed it into actual clay yet, or is that still living in the mockups?