(01). BRANDING
Which fruit do you put on the logo when the shop sells forty of them?
Exotic Season imports Salvadoran produce and pantry staples into Houston. Before the shop existed there was no mark, no palette, and no answer to that question.
So we did not send a logo. We built three complete routes — lettering, symbol, colour and a tote bag to test each one — and let the client decide standing in front of all three.
The film – 2024
(02) THE ONBOARDING
Three finished proposals, not three sketches
A mandala assembled out of fruit slices, in magenta and lime, over a soft lowercase wordmark. It reads as festival and abundance — the whole basket at once. Lovely as a pattern. But a mandala shrinks badly: at the size of a browser tab it collapses into a dot.
A rounded geometric wordmark with a leaf growing out of the o. Clean, modern, effortless to reproduce anywhere. It also looked like every other healthy-eating brand — and this shop is not a health-food shop. It is the pantry people left behind.
Handwritten lettering with a guava cross-section above it, in deep green and orange. It was the only one with a hand in it. This is the route that carried through — although the symbol did not survive the way it was drawn.
(03) THE DECISIONS
What changed between the route that won and the logo that shipped
The brush script survived because it is the one part a competitor cannot pull out of a font menu. The orange went: against real fruit photography it argued with the produce instead of framing it. Deep green won because everything the shop sells can be photographed on it without a clash.
Route 03 put a single guava inside a circle. The final mark cuts two fruits open — guava and soursop — and overlaps them. Two says variety without having to draw forty. The cross-section says fresh, and it is the view a supermarket shelf never gives you.
Drawn flat, no gradients, four colours. That is what lets it hold at 32 pixels in a browser tab and still carry a tote bag at full size, from the same file.
The two-fruit cut-out became a system: every category gets its own tinted banner with its own fruit, drawn in the same flat language. The identity did not stop at the logo — it is what the store is made of.
Exotic Season is not a fruit brand. It is a Salvadoran pantry, and the mark had to say that in one glance.
Francisco Gonzalez Project Manager
