café kayal

café kayal in islamabad, teeming with conversations, coffee, art and an indoor garden, was looking for a visual identity. i made a handmade logo to celebrate all that the space is. here’s how it came to be.

in tamil, kayal means fish and kayalveli is the word for lake in malayalam. the word kayal is also poetic for how close it is to the urdu word khayaal or thought.

borrowing from these concepts, the form for café kayal’s logo mark mimics the organic shapes of fish scales, ripples on a lake, and the dappled surface of the moon, set in a hand-drawn circle as imperfect as the moon. the custom font is hand-drawn and rounded.