Asheervad Tiles & Marble

Asheervad Tiles & Marble sells tile and marble in Ramnagar, Uttar Pradesh. The identity had to work where it would actually be seen, which is not a brand book: a shopfront, a visiting card handed across a counter, and a status image forwarded to somebody deciding between two suppliers in the same market.

The mark begins as an A and stops being one. Three steps take the letter apart, and they are kept in the artwork rather than hidden: the crossbar goes, the two strokes thicken into slabs, and the stroke left over becomes the vein running through stone. What remains reads first as two tiles with a seam between them and second, for anyone who looks twice, as the first letter of the name.

The palette is taken from the material instead of from a trend. Teal for glazed tile, taupe for marble before it is polished, brown for terracotta, all set on the cream of the wall they go up against. Terrazzo carries everything else: the same three colours broken into chips, fine enough to read as paper stock on a card and coarse enough to be a pattern on a poster, so one language covers the whole range without a second one being invented for it.

Bodoni 72 sets the name. It is a bookish, high-contrast face rather than the heavy sans a tile showroom usually reaches for, and that is the argument: it lends a small shop the composure of a supplier who has been on that road a long time.