ZURI

Client: Zuri

Year: 2020

Industry: Independent Beauty

Deliverables: Brand identity, logo, typography, product naming, collateral applications

The Brief

Zuri was developed by Priscilla Rasjid (Sissy Sosro), a Jakarta-based makeup artist with over a decade of professional experience across Paris, Sydney, and Singapore, who wanted to launch an independent beauty brand that made professional-quality results accessible to everyday consumers. The positioning was specific: “Now you can create an everyday beauty like a pro.”

The challenge was translating that into a visual identity that felt designed and considered without losing the accessibility the brand was built on. Zuri needed to stand for something beyond affordable cosmetics. It needed a concept sturdy enough to carry a full product system, beginning with an eyebrow pencil in three shades.

The name itself set the tone: Zuri means beauty in Swahili. The identity had to earn that weight.

The Work

The concept the studio developed was time.

Makeup is one of the few consumer products that is explicitly bound to the rhythm of a day. It is applied, worn, and reapplied. Rather than treating this as a functional fact, the studio treated it as the brand’s organizing logic. Time became the framework through which every visual decision was made.

The logo system is structured around four parts of the day: morning, noon, evening, and night. Each part represents a distinct moment of reapplication. The mark holds all four simultaneously, not as a sequence but as a complete picture of the time a day contains.

The product naming system follows the same logic. The three eyebrow pencil shades are named 701, 702, and 703—numerical indicators that function as temporal codes rather than descriptive color names.

Typographic Decisions

The logo is set in a custom typeface designed by Latihan Tipografi specifically for Zuri, built from the ground up rather than drawn from an existing library. The decision was not aesthetic preference but conceptual necessity: no existing typeface could carry the four-part temporal structure the logo system required without the concept reading as applied rather than inherent. The letterforms had to embody the logic of morning, noon, evening, and night.

The System in Use

The physical deliverable is an eyebrow pencil. At this scale, the numerical naming system does its clearest work: 701, 702, 703 reads as a considered series, not three isolated products. The mark, the number, and the color occupy the same surface with the same hierarchy the typographic system establishes everywhere else.

*This project predates the studio’s founding. It was completed while Risabella Wongso was working at gemasemesta.co. Every deliverable conceived and executed by her & team.