Situation
Its original logo had dated and no longer represented the company Riesen had become, so it ran a small design contest to find a new identity. Five concepts were presented, ours was chosen, and we then developed it into the full identity.
Riesen Holzbau AG
Riesen Holzbau AG
Riesen Holzbau AG has built in timber since 1997: houses, cabins and custom wooden projects. The project came to us through Business Leaders AG.
- INDUSTRY:
- Timber Construction
- SERVICES:
- Logo Design, Brand Identity
- LOCATION:
- Switzerland
- DELIVERABLES:
- Brand positioning, Icon and wordmark, Colour palette, Brand workbook, Print applications, Workwear
Riesen Holzbau AG — Timber Construction Logo
Solution
Holzbau means timber construction, and the icon says exactly that in one shape: a house made of wood. Its outline is the plain silhouette of a house, a pitched roof over straight walls. Inside it, instead of a door or windows, sits the end grain of a tree trunk, its growth rings running across the facade.
The mark holds two kinds of form in balance. The house is geometric, drawn on a strict grid with the roof pitch and the walls fixed by construction lines. The wood is organic and uneven, grown rather than drawn. That meeting of the built and the grown is what a timber construction company does every day, and it is what makes the mark recognisably Riesen’s rather than any builder’s.
The house. A pentagon set on a construction grid, with the roof angle and wall lines fixed by guides that extend beyond the shape. It gives the mark a stable, architectural base that reads instantly as a building.
The rings. The growth rings radiate from the bottom corner, where the heart of the trunk would be, and widen as they move outward, so the house appears to have been cut from the end of a log.
The outer edge. Toward the roofline the rings give way to a solid band with an irregular edge, like the bark at the outside of a trunk, which carries the organic character right up to the geometric outline.
The wordmark. Riesen Holzbau AG is set in wide, extended capitals with larger initials, a steady horizontal line of type that echoes a timber beam. A rule underneath runs the full width of the logo and grounds the whole composition like a sill.
The tagline. Stolz auf Holz, proud of wood, is the only handwritten element in the identity. Set in a loose script beneath the rule, it adds a human voice to an otherwise engineered logo: the signature of people who work with their hands.
