Suubakdo Logo

This is the first (and only) logo I've ever been asked to do in a language I don't speak. The client didn't speak it either. In fact, no one I knew spoke either language (Korean and Chinese).

I don't know if you've ever tried to translate a western language into an eastern one. That's probably hard. But how do you translate an eastern language you don't even begin to understand?

Bottom line, those characters are way too complex to simply be hand-drawn by someone who has no training in the language (me). We had to be able to reproduce the actual characters, digitally (from a keyboard) or the project would be doomed to failure.

As it turns out, the Korean part wasn't that bad. I was able to guess the sounds and experiment with the Korean IME (Input Editor) on my Mac until my guesses matched reality. But the Chinese characters were much harder.

The fact that the original logo looked like a bad scan from a milk carton didn't help :-)

So how did we do it? Why, we cheated, of course! We found some Japanese speakers who recognized portions of the Chinese characters, and after some trial and error, were able to tell us how to recreate it.