Kokonata

Kokonata is a live client brand identity project developed during university, and it is one of the most complete pieces of design work I have made. The brief was real: an actual client, an actual product, a brand that needed to exist in the world rather than just on a page.

The research process took me to Sri Lanka. The brand's roots are there, in the mask makers, Hindu temples, stilt fishermen, coconut culture, and the distinct visual language of Sri Lankan vernacular architecture. I studied local huts, traditional postage stamps, and the textures of coastal life to find a visual logic that felt genuinely rooted rather than borrowed.

From that research, the woodblock print process emerged as the right language. Part of what drew me to carving was discovering that Sri Lankan craftspeople carve intricate designs from coconut shells, a tradition visible in the research imagery on this page. That connection between the coconut and the act of cutting felt too direct to ignore. Palm motifs were hand-drawn, hand-cut, and pressed to produce mark-making that carries the weight of the material process. The resulting prints became both the origin point of the logo and a textural vocabulary for the whole brand: something that could only have been made by hand, by someone who cared about where the work was coming from.

The identity work that followed produced a range of design directions rather than a single resolved answer. Each option was developed as a genuine proposal, and the full set was presented to the client for consideration. What you see here is the breadth of that thinking: from the bold geometric wordmark built from circles and triangles, to the stamp-motif application, to the product mockups. The process was the point as much as any individual outcome.