As logical as possible. "Design" according to Y's, the company behind Kemono Friends logo

Ryuhei Yoneda: Y's celebrates its seventh term this year. We have more than 70 employees, and about 10 of them are creators like me.

I was originally working as a designer at another company, and after being there for 3 years I decided it was the time to found my own. After all, it's better to try and fail when you're still young.

While thinking about what kind of logo could best convey the cuteness of Serval-chan, it was decided that the first step of the project would be for the title to be made into a video game. While keeping that in mind, I designed a logo that could be used for any upcoming project.

Yoneda: I think the steps that need to be taken for every kind of design, including logos and visuals, are kind of the same. First of all, we need to come up with a few keywords. In this case, words that describe the character settings by cutting out the constituent elements of the title, such as "a world featuring various animals", or "a simple concept that can be loved for a long time", or "warm feelings", or "kawaii characters". 

That is why I don't just create what I want; instead, for Kemono Friends, I had to keep in mind the ultimate goal for Yoshizaki's project.

After drawing some drafts by hand, I took the ones I thought were closer to the ultimate goal of the project and imported them into my PC. At the beginning, I tend to work on the shape without worrying much about coloring.

Since the design gets more and more complicated by increasing color information, I focus on the shape to create something close to the image I have. Once you get used to it, you can also add colors from the beginning - but you need to be careful because you might end up wanting to fix a bad shape with colors. That's why I always tell beginners: "Design it in black and white first"!

By the way, when you meet your client for the first time, you'll end up coming up with so many ideas (laughs). I try not to aim at anything in particular during the first stage since potentially anything could work.

However, human nature makes it easier for us to make a choice if there are many options. That's why if you end up presenting one single idea, you'll probably be asked for more. Psychologically, it's easier to choose between 5 options rather than between 2. The fact that there are options has the effect of reducing backtracking and consequently shortening production time.

He's truly a genius for connecting the concept of logo to the word off-guard. (laughs)

However, a problem that I encountered is that every single letter ended up representing an animal, and you could understand which animal just based on the color. It shows a limited creativity, and I didn't want that.

Yoneda: I did. Since I knew that Kemono Friends was a project that was going to expand in different directions, I knew from the start that the game was only the beginning. Yoshizaki's goal was to encourage as many people as possible to visit zoological gardens, so I knew that there would probably be many other projects coming up, such an anime.