Culture beats clever logos

I keep coming back to this: in consumer apps, clever letterforms matter less than instant, cultural recognition. In India, the icon and the language you greet users with build more trust than a tagline. Only if the app earns it in use. 🎵👇

On Aug 30, 2015 I said Gaana’s identity underperformed not from kerning alone. It didn’t make people feel. I proposed leaning into Hindi: use the Devanagari ga ग as the anchor, fix a-a-n with a triple ligature, pick a friendlier geometric wordmark, and make the icon primary. This was UX led branding. Meet users in their language. Let the product sustain it.

Typography: the wordmark felt sharp and uneven. The a-n ligature left the first a adrift. A triple a-a-n ligature fixes cadence. Futura italic signals motion. Brandon Grotesque for secondary. Let OpenType and careful kerning do the work.
Icon: the Devanagari ga looks like a musical note. Memorable and on theme. Multi script marks need testing at tiny sizes, on low cost screens, and under iOS masks or Android adaptive shapes.
Color: oversaturated reds bloom on OLED. Pink pops yet can bias genre. Treat color like a system across light and dark.

2015-2025 changed the field. Spotify entered India in 2019. YouTube Music and JioSaavn leaned into vernacular catalogs. Android brought adaptive icons and then Material You. Language first onboarding became normal. Variable fonts and better Devanagari support like Noto lowered the cost of multi script identity.
What aged well: icon first thinking, script aware branding, typography as UX.
What I underweighted: cross language search, transliteration, and voice input. Brand feeling now travels through synced lyrics, recommendations, and share flows, not just the mark.

Principles: clear icon over cleverness. Start in the user’s language. Typography is UX. Color is a system, not a mood.
Questions: dual script logos or keep script in product UI. How to test emotion across regions and devices without overfitting. When does category color help recognition vs hurt distinctiveness.
Full post: https://anandchowdhary.com/blog/2015/gaana-identity