Behind the design of our logo

Meet the Graphic Designer of the Äidinkielenä Monikielisyys logo!

Hello everybody! I’m Melis, a graphic designer from Istanbul, Turkey. I started volunteering for Familia last year soon after I joined the Finnish language course of the organization. I love how Familia supports and helps us to get to know about diverse families and cultures in Finland. I myself like Finnish culture and Finland a lot. Even though I only visited Helsinki once, It felt very welcoming with the multi-cultural structure and comfort that I saw in peoples face. I’m still learning a lot about Finnish culture; and hearing from the diverse people living in Finland, I understand more and more everyday. That’s why I feel very lucky to be a part of this community as a foreigner myself:) ​

When I got to design a logo for Familia, my profession and love for different cultures engaged. Äidinkielenä Monikielisyys - Multi Mother-Tongued, aims to make the bilingual and multilingual family members be seen and accepted by the government officially, and create a new perspective for the intercultural families’ identities. With empathy and understanding, diversity is much more valuable in peoples minds, which is necessary in order to maintain the peace in our society. ​

I was mostly excited about the topic of empathy because we can not understand each other without it. We got together and brainstormed about an idea with Familia’s team. For the “Multi Mother-Tongued” logo, I started to think about a few topics; conversation, inter-culture, and a joint purpose. Visually, many things came to mind; fractions, smiles, speech bubbles and so on. With many things in mind, I tried to design a friendly, welcoming and a colorful logo for all the diverse people living in Finland.

After discussing the first drafts, we decided on the final logo with multiple colors representing the inter-cultural purpose. For this one, I thought about a matryoshka doll, an interbedded visual that represents multi-language structure; each of it is unique but working together as well. With conversation topic in mind, intertwined speech bubbles looked more suitable for the purpose of the campaign. Designing a custom-made font, drawing each letter made the logo more unique in its own way. The style of the logo is very familiar and friendly, the hand-drawn look makes it look like a signature as well, that this campaign aims to collect. For the colors, we decided on 4 colors that are again, working well together and also representing the variety of cultures and backgrounds of languages. We decided on not too bright, and not too bland color tones. ​

This project was very fun and eye-opening for me. I got to work with the Familia team combining my two interests; talking about empathy and graphic design:) I’m very pleased and happy with the process and the result. Hopefully, I’ll see myself in many projects like this, within Familia family :)
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Kiitos paljon!

Melis
Communications Volunteer residing in Turkey

​You can also read this blog and sign the petition for the Äidinkielenä Monikielisyys campaign on their website!