СЕМИБАРВИЦЯ
A mountain resort in the Ukrainian Carpathians. The name means «seven colours» — the rainbow. The client arrived with a logo that drew exactly that: seven petals, seven flat inks. Our job wasn't to take the colour away. It was to take it out of the symbol.
The name is the rainbow. That was never the mistake — where it lived was.
СЕМИБАРВИЦЯ · «SEVEN COLOURS»01The idea
The mistake wasn't the rainbow — the name IS the rainbow, it had to stay. The mistake was where it lived. We pulled it out of the petals and put it behind them. The symbol became a single white silhouette — a seven-leaf plant, three pairs and a crown on a straight stem — and the colour became the field it sits on: a continuous gradient from orange through magenta to blue. Seven colours are still there. They're just no longer inside the drawing.
The symbol, one ink. The colour, the field behind it.
02At the gate
The entrance disc was the first real piece. Forty centimetres, printed in full colour on enamelled steel: here the gradient bothers nobody, because it never has to shrink or be cut — it's a flat surface the size of a plate. It's the one large piece where the colour comes out whole, and that's why people remember it.
03Full colour, small
Round things looked at close range: the key fob of each house, the breakfast mug, the jar of honey from the pantry. The circle fits as it is, nothing shrinks, and the gradient does exactly what it's good at — catching the eye at arm's length.
04And in a single ink
Where there's no printing there's silhouette. The same plant, no circle and no gradient: burned into oak, embroidered in cream thread on the sauna towel, pressed with a rubber stamp onto the welcome note. None of these three was possible with the old logo — and they are exactly the three a guest touches with their hands.
05In the rooms
An engraved brass plate with the room number, a linen napkin with the mark in the corner. Two objects made once and kept for ten years: the real test of whether a symbol holds.
06The system
Three versions and one rule. Full with the name for signage and web. Short — «7BRV» — for small things: profiles, stamps, labels, because СЕМИБАРВИЦЯ is eleven letters and stops being readable at two centimetres. And the symbol alone, for when they already know you. The rule: the gradient never touches the plant.
07On paper
The card carries the name, two lines of contact and nothing else. The reverse is the full gradient with the symbol centred: the one printed piece where the colour goes all out — and it works precisely because everywhere else it doesn't.
08And this is where it came from
We left it for the end on purpose. A seven-petal lotus, each petal a different flat colour, inside a green ring that never quite closed. Six and a half inks, no small size possible, no single-ink version: over a forest photo it vanished, and as a stamp or an embroidery it simply didn't exist. Nothing you've seen above — the wood, the thread, the brass, the stamp — could have been made with this.
