Rahmi Halaby
Yanasa Creative Group — which came to me as Lenape Creative Group — is an artist-owned new media and creative consulting firm working across art, film, fashion, design, and entertainment. The work was extraordinary, but the identity was scattered: four co-creative directors, two coasts, and no shared visual language holding any of it together. So I didn't start with a logo — I started with the land, commissioning a hand-drawn topographical map of Lenape territory as the root of the entire identity. From there I built a color system that gives each sector its own signal while still reading as one family: land as the foundation, color as the wayfinding.
Starting with the Land
Client.
Yanasa Creative Group
Category.
Visual Identity
Contributors.
Rahmi Halaby
The name was the key that unlocked everything. "Lenni-Lenape" translates to "Original People" — the founders chose it deliberately to express their core idea: the Business of Creativity with Integrity. Once I sat with that, leading with a topographical map felt less like a design choice and more like the only honest one. If the brand is named for original people and original land, the identity should be built on the ground itself.
So that's where we led. I had a topographical map of the Lenape land drawn, and it became the conceptual and literal bedrock of the system — the texture, the linework, the logic everything else grew out of. Topography is a perfect metaphor for what this company actually is: layered, dimensional, shaped by history, and best understood when you can see all the elevations at once. It also quietly solved their aesthetic brief, which pulled from nature, technology, and the tension between the two. Contour lines are exactly that — a natural landscape translated into a technical, mapped language.
The second problem was structural. Yanasa isn't one business; it's several under one roof — art, film, fashion, design, consulting. A single flat identity would either flatten those distinctions or collapse into chaos trying to hold them. So I built a color system where each sector gets its own identifier, drawn from the earth-and-jewel-tone palette the founders were instinctively drawn to (and pointedly away from anything traditional, soft, or conservative). The color does the wayfinding. You can tell which arm of the company you're looking at before you read a word, and the sectors still resolve into one coherent whole because they all live on the same topographic foundation.
Aesthetically I leaned into the references they gave me — the range and boldness of Mara Hoffman, the reclaimed-material density of El Anatsui, the boundary-breaking hybridity of Wangechi Mutu, the color fields of Frank Bowling. The throughline in all of them is richness without uniformity, and that became my north star: a system with real range and vibrancy that never tips into being busy or safe.
The deliverable was a brand book meant to live in two places at once — a shared reference the four directors could align around internally, and a polished external identity ready to hand to a web designer and carry into the rooms where the company needs to be taken seriously.
The biggest shift was cohesion. The founders came in naming their number-one challenge as the lack of a cohesive visual brand — four strong creative voices with no shared language. The topographic system gave them that common ground, literally. It's a framework any of them can design within without the output fragmenting, which matters enormously for a firm where the creative direction is genuinely distributed across four people.
Strategically, the identity did what they needed it to do: it became infrastructure. Their whole business model runs through digital presence — grant applications that require a website, festival submissions that need a credible online footprint, art sales and client work that live or die on how the work is published. By anchoring the brand in something conceptually unshakeable (the land, the name, the color system), I gave them a foundation a web designer could build straight onto, rather than a logo that would need re-explaining every time the company grew into a new sector.
And it grew. The company has since evolved into Yanasa Creative Group — a rebrand the original system was built flexible enough to carry, because it was rooted in ideas and structure rather than a single fixed mark.
If I'm being straight about it, the thing I'm most proud of here is that the concept came from them — from their name, their values, their relationship to land and lineage — and my job was mostly to listen closely enough to find it and then make it visible. The best identities aren't imposed on a brand; they're excavated from it. This one was sitting in the meaning of a single word the whole time.
Azzim Dukes Initiative
