"The Green Locus" is born!

Out there its all green. Its all waiting to be explored. And it has a name...

The pertinent question was what is it that we would like our ideology to be called? We did not want to call it a firm, a company, or an organization because we were none! We just had a thought, an idea, an ideology. We didn't know how we could make it known to people. Perhaps make it a business? An NGO? A co-operative? We didn’t know! So, it made all sense to just call it an “ideology” and the obvious next step was to give it a name.

We wanted a name and a logo that describes our identity and touches each aspect of our ideology: the people, the culture and the nature. It was easy to derive one common theme which kind of dwells in our area of work. The Greenery! All locations that we are working at are in the green Kumaun Hills. When you work or live close to nature you realize that it is an integral part of your being, somehow you feel connected to it. It is a connection which can only be felt and can hardly be described. So, the starting point we thought, could not be better than green mountains.

And so, here we went... Green mountains.

Green Mountains

OK. A little work done. What next? I thought to myself, this looks incomplete. There is something very elementary missing. And then suddenly it clicked. We need some sunshine on these hills!

So here we go, a little sunny speck between the hills.

Suddenly it was all looking like a grade 1 drawing class except that we were not using scales, set-squares, compasses or crayons, we were making use of powerpoint and auto shapes and colouring them at our will! This was turning out to be a lot more fun than I had expected. The iconic scenery which we all have created during childhood flashed through our minds. Wow! I had never imagined that I could make such a use of a subject which I considered worthless during my school days. Suddenly that reminded me of my drawing teachers and made them the subject of my respect and gratitude!

By now, colour green was all over our minds. And why not, we thought, after all if there is a colour that symbolizes the life in the hills, it is green. It is the colour that surrounds us in these mountains and it is the colour that we want people to get familiar with. Green is the colour of the the plant life, the colour of prosperity and in the words of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the second president of India while describing the green colour on the Indian national flag: "... The green shows our relation to (the) soil, our relation to the plant life here, on which all other life depends." So that was it. Look no further. We adopted the word and the colour Green. And now we just wanted it to be complete. A bit of thinking and we came down to 4 names:

Mood Green - probably describing the mood that we were in and thinking about.
Green Woods - quite simply means Green jungles.
Modus Green - Our work is Green and needless to point out - environment friendly.

And then, the masterpiece. The Green Locus!

WOW! my wife said and that was the stamp of approval for me. All said and done, it felt like this very much relates to the vast expanse in the Kumaun Himalayas that we would work in. Out there its all green! And voila! We thought, that could be the logo line. Suddenly there was clarity and consensus!

So now, we wanted to incorporate this in our logo as well. I scribbled down a few doodles on a notebook and also wrote The Green Locus on a powerpoint slide. Tried a few different fonts and finally came up with this.

OK. This is fine. Now combine this with the logo.

So, we had something at our hand. Now was the time for some critical thinking. Does it embody all that we stand for? Does it include the three aspects that we touch in our work: Nature, Culture and People? Well, Nature, yes, definitely! But what about culture and people? We wanted a dash of both. Which means, we were not done yet.

What could it be? We thought for a while before a little painting flashed across my mind. I remembered that my mother used to paint two little foots symbolizing Goddess Laxmi, the Goddess of wealth and prosperity, on the floor of our house during the time of Diwali, the festival of light. This painting is called Aipan and is very famous in the Kumaun region of Himalayas. It is totally eco-friendly as it is made of rice paste very craftily spread over Terracotta patches to make intricate designs.

AIPAN - A Kumauni art form

This is very specific to the Kumaun region and we immediately wanted this to be a part of our logo. So, I replaced the O in LOCUS with the circular Aipan design. Then we thought, if these feet could signify a Goddess why not throw an irony and use a separate pair of feet to exemplify the bare-footed woman from the hills who often treads the forests in search of wood for fuel and grass for their livestock? Women, it must be told, in this part of the country have been living a life full of struggle since ages. A life which she has been able to live through just on a strong will to live and bring up her children. Its a massive social issue in the hills and its only until recently that women have stood up against the malpractices that haunt this region. So, there we added another pair of feet and this was how the logo appeared now.

To me that was it! A job well done I thought. But as usually is the case, the power of attorney rests with my wife. She concluded that the logo ignores a very basic geographical feature of the Kumaun Himalayas, the Snow covered peaks of higher Himalayas. So we wanted this to be present in the logo, but how? A white snow line in white background didn’t make sense. The solution, a black background. So finally, the Sun on our logo took a back seat and the Himalayan snowline towered behind the green hills.

The Green Locus

The Green Locus had been born! It was a moment of silent admiration. What we had was a simple design. Yet to us, it was nothing less than a masterpiece. It was a naive yet heartily attempt at building a logo that exemplifies the philosophy of The Green Locus.