Baanali
Yellow Mushrooms.
Sugar, spice & everything nice. Baanali is a South Indian food start-up that serves authentic Andhra delicacies. he founders, inspired by a longing for the traditional foods of their village, began crafting age-old recipes passed down through generations.
Baanali, derived from the Telugu term for a metal frying pan with handles, was carefully chosen after a workshop to finalize the brand name. The team selected this name to anchor the brand in the essence of the regional cuisine it offers, ensuring ease of pronunciation and uniqueness within its market space. Our vision for Baanali was to visually encapsulate the founders’ core ideas and emotions, creating a representation of the brand’s values and personality.
As someone not native to the Telugu-speaking region, delving into the script for designing the identity posed a challenge, given my familiarity with the typographic rules of the Latin script. This necessitated unlearning previous principles and embracing new ones. Despite this shift, I remained unafraid to experiment, liberated from conventional rules. Throughout the identity design process, my primary focus was ensuring legibility, even when arranging the alphabets unconventionally, while also assessing the appropriateness of their placement.
A crucial visual aspect aimed to capture the rusticity and textures of an aged frying pan, reflecting the generational heritage embedded in the brand’s food offerings. To achieve this effect, I utilized paint and oil to create a textured impression on paper, extracting distinct characteristics from the brush strokes’ edges. Subsequently, I digitized these elements, seamlessly integrating them into the overall identity design.
The illustration presented vividly captures the entire journey of the product, starting from sourcing and cleaning the raw materials to cooking, packaging, and ultimately selling the finished product.