125th year of Pune Ganeshotsav.Story Behind Logo Design

We in Pune are always a bit more excited for Ganesh Festival from the rest of the world and let’s be honest about it, the city thrives beautifully during this festival to make it the best. So in this enthusiasm that starts prevailing even a month before the start of the festival, we at Avail Advertising were just a little… okay more than just a little excited about this season.
In came a very big yet beautiful opportunity knocking our doors with Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) inviting a selected brands in advertising & marketing domain for a meet. The city was going to witness one of the major Ganesh Festival events with 2017 being the quasquicentennial year or in simple words the 125th year of the festival. The task that PMC kept infront was to design a logo for this 125th year celebration. Bang on! What more does a ‘Punekar’ need? Serving our lord in a creative way is what everyone is always looking forward to.
So then began the process of developing a logo which would stand-out from the rest and also depict the essence of the festival and the traditional glory of the city. Our creative team at Avail Advertising sat scratching their heads for a while and then started the flow of ideas. The idea was to keep the logo as simple as the traffic signals, which not only be identifiable easily but also serve the purpose.
We took the base of Lord Ganesha’s face, but it wasn’t the designed face used commonly all over. Inspired from Ashtavinayak Ganpati idols from Maharashtra, the logo carries an illustration of Ganesha without any expression on the face in a very simplistic and easy to draw design. The saffron colour which denotes the auspiciousness in Hindu culture fills the Ganesh design just like those of Ashtavinayak idols. The final touch to the Ganesha face comes with a perfect white coloured three finger tilak.
The face is placed between a colour scheme of blue, green and vermillion red which are not only bright and eye catching colours but also represent the colours generally used in decorating and colouring Lord Ganesha’s attire. With understanding the traditional view and the cultural heritage that this festival in this city carries, we took the best of Marathi fonts to write the glorious number ‘125’ on the logo. We kept the number font large and filled it with the same colour scheme of blue, green and vermillion. We added the Marathi text to write the title of the festival event especially considering the pride that the city of Pune has for the Marathi language. The white space was as important to the logo as it is to view a perfect rainbow and hence we adopted a white coloured background for the other colours to make an effect.
Husshh… ! Finally after so much of brain storming and chipping and changing, we made what spoke of the culture behind the festival as well as the energy of this city for celebrating it. Keenly working on the visual simplicity, the logo was not closed from any sides which added that beautiful simplistic painting like effect to the arrangement of illustrations and words. We were happy. Now was the turn to impress PMC.
A smile of content in our hearts was felt as PMC selected our logo for this big event from among the logo designs submitted by other Advertising Agencies. It was a lot of hard work, especially for our designers. It paid off rather so big. We cheered in our office with the news hitting us & thus 125 years of Pune’s greatest festival had a logo which we proudly say was designed by us.
The logo soon came out with a grand inauguration ceremony at Shanivarwada, Pune and was inaugurated in the hands of Shri Devendra Fadanvis, hon. Chief Minister of Maharashtra. Soon the buzz about this logo got going on social media and our logo design company and branding consultants got a pat on their backs from many.
Graced by the blessings of Ganpati Bappa, we were an indirect, yet a very vital part of this historic year of Ganesh Festival which we would relish for many years to come.
We loudly say “Ganpati Bappa Morya, Ashaach Ajun Opportunities Dya!”