Brand · 视觉识别
A disc of contour lines, a heart at the centre, one red bean.
How SEESALT looks, and why: the mark, the red bean tree it grows from and the acacia beside it, its colours and type, and the small line drawings that run through the site. Written down so that anyone who works under the name can use them without asking.
The mark, read from the outside in
Four layers, each one a decision.
The mark is drawn, not assembled. Every part of it says something about how we try to work.
The disc — lapis
A deep, steady blue: the colour of the field we work in, and of no institution. The disc is a whole place seen from above, with nothing outside it pointed at.
The contour lines, or waves
Lines of equal height are how a map records land without flattening it. Look at the same lines again and they are waves coming in. We keep both readings on purpose: ground to stand on, and weather to stand in, since the places we work in are shaped as much by what breaks over them as by what lies under them. The lines are uneven and not quite concentric, because no place is a perfect circle and no year is calm. They also describe the method: from the outside in, one line at a time.
The heart
The innermost line closes into a heart. At the centre of any terrain we map there are people we care about. A method that forgets them is only measurement.
The red bean — 相思红豆
The red dot is a red bean, the seed that Chinese poetry has used for longing and attachment for well over a thousand years. It sits inside the heart, a little off the centre of the disc: what we carry for a place, held by someone who is never its centre. It is also a seed, as in 播种光明, sowing light.
The wordmark
SEESALT is set in Jost, a geometric sans, widely spaced so the name reads as calm rather than loud. Our Chinese name, 世光, light for the world, sits beneath it.
The reading of the contour lines as waves owes something to Hiroyuki Sawano’s song “EGO” (2011), about meeting a storm and learning from it.
The same lines, turned on their side: waves coming in, and one red bean carried on them, the way seeds have always crossed seas.
The red bean tree · 红豆树
The tree the bean comes from.
红豆生南国，春来发几枝。
愿君多采撷，此物最相思。— 王维《相思》
Red beans grow in the southern lands;
when spring comes, how many new branches?
Gather as many as you can —
nothing holds longing like these.
The bean in our mark comes from a tree, and the tree is our second emblem, the way the olive branch serves others. It grows in the south, where most of our work is. Each spring it puts out new branches, as each year brings new programmes under the name. And what it bears is not a product but an attachment: to a place, and to the people in it.
Two trees · 红豆树与金合欢
Two trees on the same ground.
The red bean tree is a Chinese tree. The umbrella-thorn acacia, with its flat crown, grows across the dry savannas of eastern and southern Africa. Botanically they are cousins: both belong to the legume family, and both carry their seeds in pods. They are not the same tree, and neither grew from the other. Each grew in its own soil.
One red bean, on the tree our mark comes from. The acacia keeps its own pods.
That is how we try to think about development knowledge moving between China and Africa. Chinese development scholars call it 平行经验分享, parallel experience sharing. What travels is experience a developing country has already tested in its own practice, offered as a reference rather than a prescription. It is carried by people who work on concrete problems, such as agronomists, doctors and engineers, rather than by professionals who write development plans for others. And it builds a community of peers who face similar problems, in which learning runs in both directions.
So the drawing has no arrow in it. The two trees stand on one line of ground, each its own shape, and neither points at the other. The idea itself came out of more than a decade of everyday work with governments, universities and villages in Tanzania, which is the kind of origin we trust.
Xu Xiuli and Li Xiaoyun, 《平行经验分享：中国对非援助理论的探索性构建》, 世界经济与政治 (World Economics and Politics), 2020, no. 11, pp. 117–135. The journal’s English abstract renders the term as “closing-gap experience sharing”. Read the article (PDF).
Lockups
The same mark, four ways, and two branches.
Use the horizontal lockup wherever there is room for it, the stacked one in narrow or square spaces, and the mark alone where the name is already on the page.
Colour
Blues for the ground. Red for one thing only.
Vermilion is never a background, a heading or a button. It is the red bean, and nothing else, which is why the eye goes to it.
#1A3486The disc of the mark
#0F1D4DSite footer, dark panels
#D2462AThe red bean. Only the bean.
#00356BPage sections, links, line drawings
#EEF3F9Alternate section ground
#9DBBDDQuiet text and drawings on dark
#0F1C2EBody text
#FFFFFFContour lines; page ground
Type
A geometric name, a reading serif.
Jost
The wordmark and the site footer. Medium weight, wide letter-spacing, capitals only.
Source Serif 4
Headings and body text on every page. One family, two weights, no all-caps labels.
Songti SC · PingFang SC
Chinese text, following the reader’s system fonts so that it renders cleanly on every device.
Line drawings
Field-notebook drawings, each with one red bean.
The site uses small line drawings where a page would otherwise go quiet. They are drawn to four rules, so that new ones can be added by anyone and still belong.
One line, no fill
A single 1.4 px stroke with round ends, in deep blue on light grounds and sky on dark ones.
One red bean
The only colour, and the same bean as in the mark. It marks the person, the seed, the thing left out, or the place still open. There is never a second one.
Dashes mean movement
A route, a return, a glow of light, an empty seat: dashed lines are for what is moving or not yet there.
Drawn from our own work
Each drawing illustrates something a programme actually did or found. No stock pictures of “communities”.
Using the mark
A few rules, so it stays itself.
Do
- Leave clear space around the mark of at least a quarter of the disc’s width.
- Place it on white, mist, lapis or navy.
- Use the horizontal lockup when the name is not already on the page.
- Reach for the red bean branch, not other plants, when a page needs an ornament.
- Credit SEESALT and link back when you use a drawing or a method.
Don’t
- Recolour the bean, move it, or add a second one.
- Stretch, rotate, outline or shadow the mark, or set it on a busy photograph.
- Set the wordmark in any typeface other than Jost.
- Place our mark beside another institution’s in a way that suggests a partnership we do not have. Programme and university logos on this site belong to those institutions; we show them only where we were selected, never as endorsement.
For the mark as SVG or PNG, write to zhijun.he@yale.edu.