Begin Global Consulting LLC is an international semiconductor sales company based in Yokohama, Japan. The founder, Mathieu, reached out to me to design a logo for his new company after more than ten years working in-house

Starting a company after that long inside another one puts a brand in an interesting position, because the business is new but the experience behind it isn't. The logo needed to reflect that, so that a client meeting Begin Global for the first time would see a company that already knows its field.

Mathieu wanted the logo to lean towards an established, luxury style rather than the look of a new startup, so that a client meeting Begin Global for the first time would see a company that already knows its field.

The logo uses a serif font to show that the company is established and serious. In my view a serif gives a new company a sense of weight that is hard to get any other way, which mattered here because Begin Global would be working with clients who expect an experienced partner from the first meeting.

The typeface I chose was Playfair Display, which is fairly common in logo design, so I worked on the letter spacing to give it an identity of its own, setting the BGC letters tighter and the full company name with wider spacing.

The design itself is simple and easy to read, but brings in a few personal details as well. Keeping the rest of the logo plain gave those details room to be noticed, and meant the logo would hold up at small sizes on business cards and in email signatures.

The colours are intentional. The red of the bar on the left is the red of the Japanese flag, the hinomaru. The full stop after LLC uses the red from the Canadian flag, Mathieu's birth country. Together they nod to the international, cross-border nature of the brand.

Neither detail is meant to be obvious at first glance. Most people will read the logo as a company name with a red bar beside it, and the full stop only means something once you know where it came from.