Ufuk Cetincan, Pragmatic Dharma’s design lead, walks through the visual language he spent six months building—flat geometry that only appears three-dimensional, a twelve-spoke Dharma wheel left open for each practitioner’s own way, and light colors chosen to soften a practice he once pushed through by force, all in a system that has to be carefully calculated to look effortless.
💬 Transcript
Ufuk Cetincan: For the past few months, I would say for the past six months, Vince and I have been working together for the brand design and the visual language design for Pragmatic Dharma. And we thought that it would be a good idea to share it with everyone and make it like a video recording so that people can also have an insight and have a more personal understanding of what we do and why we do this. So, you know, the Pragmatic Dharma as a movement or as a platform is trying something new and modern and maybe I would say unconventional for a lot of people in the practice. And it also creates a lot of ideas about how do we convey this message in a way that it feels first enjoyable to look at as much as the practice itself, and also create this visual language that also complements the language that we are using in this group, whether it’s, you know, plain English or the things that we cannot really put into words, the wisdoms that are coming out of our practice. So it’s an effort to put everything in a way that it feels familiar and it feels coherent as a whole.
So the start of my sort of exploration came with, of course, some inspirations that I have collected along the way. Some of them I was thinking about already for a while, and it needed a creative outlet to, you know, come into fruition. And some of them I specifically researched for this project. So the inspirations are coming from a lot of different places. One of them is a visual calculation called descriptive geometry. Basically, it’s an engineering method for representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface, as you can see in the examples. And the most popular and well-known one is, you know, Escher’s drawings that uses this illusion. But it’s also used in botanical drawings, it’s used in engineering, it’s used in other fields as well. When exploring the graphic universe, I wanted to build it from the simplest possible geometric forms while still giving it a sense of depth. I was looking for a way to create dimensionality without relying on light and shadow, because what you see as three-dimensional in the world solely is the reflection of light and the shadow it casts through surfaces. Otherwise, we would see everything in two dimensions.
I didn’t want to rely on light or shadow or realistic rendering because I think this approach would work well with the idea behind Pragmatic Dharma. By reducing the visual language to a small set of adaptable geometric principles, the system becomes flexible and sustainable and actually genuinely pragmatic in a literal sense. So rather than depending on complex illustrations and an ever-growing library of assets, it can evolve consistently using a simple set of rules and simple set of geometry. So descriptive geometry became an inspiration for creating the illusion of depth using only simple geometric relationships, allowing also the visual language to feel spatial while remaining clean, minimal, and abstract.
And then my second inspiration point was a technique called riso print. It’s a short term for risograph printing. It’s basically a printmaking technique. A risograph is a color printer that can only print one color at a time. So when you print a color, and then print another color, and then print another color with your different shapes and different assets, then it has imperfections because it’s a handmade print. So every pass creates slight imperfections. Sometimes shapes overlap each other, et cetera. So yeah, while descriptive geometry became an inspiration for reducing three-dimensional forms into a two-dimensional surface, risograph printing inspired how color would complement that approach. By overlapping shades and layering colors I could create a sense of depth and compositions and the vibrant visual characters, as you can see in these examples. It also inspired a color system that is flexible, consistent, and easy to replicate across the design system, across the design language that we use, which I’m going to present a little bit further.
And then my third inspiration was these adaptive play spaces, sort of like playgrounds. These examples are built by or designed by Yinka Ilori and Andre Fogelstrom, two different people from two different companies, but they have the same essence. Unlike traditional playgrounds, like with swings and slides, these areas don’t dictate a specific way to play or interact with the surroundings. And their abstract forms naturally invites curiosity and exploration. And I wanted the graphic universe to behave the same way. It’s open to interpretation rather than being literal or descriptive. So the system is intentionally open-ended. And in that sense, I think it reflects the spirit of Pragmatic Dharma. It’s personal, it’s experiential, and nonlinear.
And then with all these abstract sort of references, I’m going to start introducing the visual language and branding, starting, of course, from the branding and the logo. So this is, as you probably have seen a few weeks since now, that this is our new logo. And there are some details about the logo that I want to highlight. I wanted to create a logo that feels modern, playful, and also have references to the traditional Dharma and the practice that we are all rooted in.
So there are a few details that I like in this logotype, the writing. The Ms and the Hs are a little bit slanted to give a distinct and modern character. And then in the logo, there’s a 12-spoke abstraction of the Dharma wheel instead of eight-spoke. It represents a personal and pragmatic approach to the practice, and the space between the spokes and the rim are representing the openness to experimentation and finding an individual way that works for you, instead of what works for everyone. And then we have the typographic set that’s the main language that we speak, the visualization of the main language that we speak. On the left side the font is more playful, more modern, and more bold. It shows up, it shows itself, and it creates like a heavy space. And on the right side, we have what we call a workhorse font. It is legible, it is dependable, it works well on every surface, whether it’s small or big. So the combination of the two is how we present the text and the language in Pragmatic Dharma.
And then we go to the brand colors. You can see the inspiration of the riso print a little bit here, that they are bright colors. They are pastel, but they are not subdued, or they are not really monotonous. They have a bit of that playfulness, that lightness in it, which I really like, because my personal practice was very masculine, forceful, you know, just trying to move forward, whatever it takes. But this light and airy approach is what I needed for my practice. So I also wanted to have that in the brand system.
And with the inspiration from descriptive geometry and all the playgrounds, I started creating and exploring different shapes. This was something that I was doing for a while, exploring the two-dimensional, three-dimensional relationship on the surface, whether by drawing by a pen or whether doing it digitally. I created a set of explorations. These are not set in stone, but to see how this open-ended mindset will look on the screen.
And then once I started adding the colors and the visual language to these explorations, it started coming together, so to speak. So these are, as you can see, abstract shapes that can have different meanings for everybody, each and everyone. That’s what I mean by open-ended. It doesn’t need to be literal. It doesn’t need to illustrate a specific thing. It is what you make out of it, just like our practice. You know, it’s what we make out of it.
And then these, of course, started to take shape as book covers, as website assets, as an app, and in different media. So from now on, I’m going to show you the examples, the concept designs for different types of medium.
This one is a book design. Of course, these book covers need to be designed and finalized. These are just placeholders, but I wanted to showcase how it will all come together when there’s a set of books or when there’s a website or an app. So it has the same look and feel to what we have been seeing so far. It is abstract geometry that feels 3D, but it’s actually 2D, accompanied with very legible, very simple, and very straightforward text and layouts. So this minimal approach is also needs to be quite well-calculated, so that everything looks in their place but also looks effortless. So this is another book cover that I studied.
So yeah, this is sort of a 3D concept design of the book. Of course, it can be a soft cover or a hard cover. So these are all primary concepts. When we have these publications, we will make it into a standardized look.
And the idea is to have these covers, what you call the book sides, have different colors. But when it all comes together in your library, for example, it will look with the same color space that we have for the branding. And the more books we have, the more interesting and colorful it gets. And then if it was an app, of course there is an app for it now. It’s like an idealized design. It doesn’t have to be exactly this. But the finalized design, let’s say, takes all its clues and sources from the concept design. So if it was an app logo, it would look like this. If it’s going to be an app, it can have these kind of pages and screens. And what you see here is even more flattened out, I would say. For example, if you look at this one, which is a custom illustration that I made, it has more depth to it, by adding these small details. On the app and on the website, it becomes more flat and more easily reproducible. The reason for that is that Vince and I’ve been also working on a cover app tool which can create these kind of covers for the posts that is put on Sangha or for the website or for the app, so that it doesn’t need me to create a cover image for every post or every update that we have on Pragmatic Dharma. So that’s what I’m going to come to as a last step, but I want to show you the different applications of the graphic universe first.
And then these are sort of the assets, or the boxes that we have for the websites, for different jobs that they have. A few of them are the post covers and different parts of the website, and how the graphic language sort of works in each space. And then, yeah, this was initially a concept design for a website post, but if you just blow it up to full screen, it can also work well as a poster or as any other medium that we want to use.
And then with all these we created a generative cover design tool with the help of AI. And I did a third iteration on that. Vince have seen a glimpse of it, but I haven’t seen the latest version, so I’m going to share this design tool and try to explain what it does.
[Live demo of the cover design tool. The narration during the screen share did not transcribe.]
And yeah, that’s the gist of it.
