The client
Exqulux is a luxury leather label — a brand whose product sells on touch and scent before it sells on sight, which meant the identity had to carry the same material quality without ever upstaging the goods. Premium leather doesn't want a loud logo screaming across it; it wants a small mark, embossed clean, that rewards the hand before the eye.
The idea — one letter, one material
The name gives you a standout letter: the X. We spent the whole first round inside that letter, pushing until it stopped reading as a typographic character and started reading as a crafted object.
What it had to do:
- Emboss on leather — no fine detail, no hollow counters, no tight curves that disappear under a 2 mm debossing die.
- Print on paper — stay elegant at business-card scale, not collapse into a blob at favicon scale.
- Sit inside a ribbon — the packaging uses a folded ribbon handle. The mark had to resolve when the ribbon passes through it without looking like a mistake.
The final glyph is a rounded X — soft bracketed terminals that feel stitched rather than stamped, with enough negative space in the crossbar that leather embossing doesn't collapse the counters. The rounded edges weren't decoration — they were a brief requirement reading "reflect the softness and premium quality of leather."
The wordmark
EXQULUX is set in Bodoni Cyrillic — a high-contrast display serif that carries the same rounded/sharp duality as the icon. Caps, generous tracking, no tail flourishes. The word reads as a label, not as a signature.
The wordmark lives in two lockups:
- Primary V1 — icon above word, stacked. The default.
- Primary V2 — icon left, word right, horizontal. For letterheads, invoices, the length of a paper-bag handle.
- Logo mark — the rounded "X" alone. For buttons, debossing dies, ribbon loops, and anywhere scale drops below 20 mm.
The visual system
Three colours, nothing else.
- Wine red —
#45080C. The hero. Depth without loudness — reads as deep burgundy in print, almost black in low light. The colour the mark lives in by default. - Gold —
#D4AF37. The secondary. Used for foil-stamp moments only — never as a fill colour on digital surfaces. Reserved for the pieces people keep. - Near-black —
#1A1A1A. The neutral. Typography, rules, line art.
Three supporting tints (#DACECE, #F6EFD7, #ECE6E7, #FBF7EB, #E6E6E6) carry background blocks in layouts where full wine would overpower the content. They're shades, not accents — used as paper, not as voice.
Three typefaces.
- Lora — primary body type. Transitional serif with warmth. Carries long copy, about-pages, product descriptions.
- Karla — secondary. Neutral grotesque for UI and data-dense surfaces where Lora would slow the reader down.
- Bodoni Cyrillic — wordmark only. Never used for body or headings.
The guideline sheet
We documented the whole system on a single tall page, the same approach we use for CityBazaar and Arzam Physics. The sheet carries the three logo variants, the concept write-up, clear-space diagrams (as multiples of the glyph's x-height), the full colour palette with hex references, the type specs, and the applied paper-bag mockups. One page, one source of truth, no 40-slide brand book that nobody opens.
Applied — packaging
The paper bag was the first test of the system in the real world. Three renders documented on the sheet:
| Render | What it proves |
|---|---|
| Eye-level shot | The mark reads through the folded ribbon handle — the "X" inside the ribbon, the wordmark across the face. One glance tells you what's in the bag. |
| Flat lay, top-down | Wordmark alone, centred. Proves the identity holds when the icon is out of view — the typography is enough. |
| Hero — angled flat lay | The piece we use in pitches. Cream stock, wine-red ribbon, the whole system in one frame. |
What we delivered
- 12 logo PNGs — Primary V1, Primary V2, and the Logo Mark, each in four colourways (Wine Red, Gold, Black, White)
- 9 profile variants — avatar-ready crops for the platforms the brand posts to, in both horizontal and vertical aspect ratios
- Vector sources — Illustrator + SVG for every lockup
- Three paper-bag mockups — eye-level, flat lay, angled hero
- Brand guideline sheet — single-page PDF, the source of truth for anyone applying the mark from here on
What we kept out
Honest scope — we designed the identity, not the leather goods and not the website. Product design, retail strategy, and e-commerce are the client's own operation. If a web brief comes back onto our desk, the mark, the palette, the type are already decided.
