Insights / From a Father’s DIY Setup to Abu Dhabi’s Next-Gen Recording Studio: The Beautiful Tale of Crafting Zariya
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By Shivangi Gupta . Branding . October 22, 2024

From a Father’s DIY Setup to Abu Dhabi’s Next-Gen Recording Studio: The Beautiful Tale of Crafting Zariya

The recording studio AR Rahman recently visited has a beautiful story of family bonds, musical talent, and compassion for the community. This story is of a newly inaugurated recording studio called Zariya Creative Media, the name inspired from the AR Rahman infamous composition.

This recording studio is led by Ayisha Abdul Basith, a rising singing star in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and it is also an ode to her singing journey. As a young prodigy, her talent was nurtured by her family. Her father, Basith, spent hours recording and editing Ayisha’s vocals, helping her develop her craft.

His studio evolved over the years, from a small setup to a functional DIY home studio. 

Such an emotional connection, of a family that dedicated their resources to seeing their daughter excel, is what makes Zariya a wholesome story with a compelling narrative that shines bright in the industry.

The origin of Zariya Creative Media

Why can’t we just open a studio?

This random thought set the sail for the venture idea of a creative studio. The founding team members, Basith and Sagar, had been longing to work together and often used to dedicate their dinner conversations to discovering the potential of various ideas. 

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A recording studio seemed quite a practical step, as it would also help Ayisha in her career’s advancement. But what made this decision practical from a standalone business perspective was the industry experience and connections of Basith and Ayisha. 

The rationality of the thought convinced Basith and Sagar to build a safe space for other artists to bloom as well. They imagined it to be a place of excellence—a one-stop where creative minds could fruitify their goals as far as music production and broadcasting or product photo shoots were concerned. With the conceptualisation of Zariya Creative Media, the founding team received astounding support from previous collaborators, and things soon fell into place. To fit their goal of being accessible to all and not getting limited by demography, the team strategically chose to be in the middle of the east—Abu Dhabi. 

The next step in translating the idea into reality was to make Zariya visible to people and find its own identity. To fulfil this step, one of Sagar’s friends, who also happens to be our long-term client, vouched for Credot.

The Discovery Conversation: When Passion Meets Partnership

This project is a reflection of Credot’s bonds with its clients. We don’t view our clients as a project; rather, we work as partners with them; we take things personally. This is what makes us and our relationship with each client unique.

Knowing this, Sagar connected with us and briefed us about Zariya’s business model. So, to fulfil our appetite for knowing the brand’s story, inspirations, ideas, goals, and intentions, both teams came together for a storytelling session where Basith and Sagar shared the journey of Zariya—right from the discovery of Ayisha’s talent to the intention of choosing Abu Dhabi as their studio location.

We focused on understanding the brands to give them their authentic identity. Here are a few highlighting facts about Zariya Creative Media that we considered while making its branding kit:

  1. The company name is reflective of the founding team member’s inclination towards spirituality. Hence, we had to be mindful of the sensory expression through the branding.
  2. The physical studio is conceptualised to be warm, welcoming, and a haven for creative thinking and execution. Hence, it was crucial for us to communicate it through the branding as well.
  3. The target audience for the studio is creators and curators of music, podcasts, and vodcasts. With this, we decided that each element of branding should be connected with music and recording.
  4. The expectations from branding was to ‘inject passion and excitement into content to reflect the joy of creative expression.’ We took this information to look into the appropriate colour palette for the brand.
  5. The studio has an ‘encouraging and supportive tone that celebrates creativity’. This was also a cue for selecting brand typography.

Crafting Identity: The Design Journey

In each of our branding projects, we communicate the brand’s aura in its elements and components, ensuring that brand presentation remains consistent across various channels and platforms.

With team Zariya, we collaborated to work on creating their brand identity. For that, we created their logo and brand kit, which includes a colour palette, typography, and imagery.

Logo Design

As much as branding projects are exciting and filled with creative processes, they are also complex tasks where both the teams, ours’ and the client’s, work together. Before our team sets to work, we always ask about how the they imagines the final logo to look like.  

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Zariya Team’s Imagination

  1. Founders love Arabic calligraphy for its beautiful complexity. Hence, they’d like to see the logo in a combination of English and Arabic lettering in a calligraphy style.
  2. It should signify “beauty and light,” which is the literal meaning of ‘Zariya’. Something like dawn, a beautiful glow against the darkness.

Credot Team’s Execution

Part 1:

For the ‘wordmark’, referred to the Arabic script fonts and selected the one that was not extensively curvy but rather subtle and simple as it was to be amalgamated with English. 

Part 2:

As the Zariya team suggested an infusion of representations of sunrise, glow, beauty, and light, we decided to add a ‘symbol logo’ as well in the main logo. This decision was taken to balance the logo and not overplay with the text.

The symbol of sunrise was sufficient to obey the keywords of ‘beauty and light’, which is the literal meaning of Zariya, but we also had to consider that it is a music industry brand; hence, a sunrise won’t distinctively represent its purpose.

Through multiple brainstorming sessions, our designers settled to amalgamate vinyl records and sun. We retained the colour of dawn for the sun and the spherical rings of vinyl records. Hence, to match the expectations, our team ended up designing a ‘combination mark’. These types of logos are a combination of wordmarks and symbols. As Zariya Creative Media is a startup, it was crucial that its logo has its name spelt in it so that it is easier to introduce it in a competitive market and build an affinity and recognisability.

Brand Kit

A logo in isolation is nothing, but it needs a whole set of specifications that the brand can resonate with through different mediums of publication. Hence, for Zariya, we also made a brand kit that consisted of a font, colour, and pattern.

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  • Typography: Fonts cover a large part of the brand’s visual identity as they set the tone of the messaging. We rely on font psychology and carefully choose the font type suitable for the brand. For Zariya, we choose Montserrat and Playfair Display as their primary fonts. Our designers then made more than twelve variable fonts.
  • Colour palette: As the symbol in the logo was inspired by dawn, we explored the colours of dawn and chose the colour that was soft and warm, which is what Sagar, the founding team member, visualised for the brand.
  • Pattern: Inspired by the logo and to keep the brand consistent, disc rings were chosen as Zariya Creative Media’s brand pattern.

Zariya is ready!

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Zariya is not merely an entrepreneurial venture but is rather a homage to the family bonds and the love for community. It is built with compassion and devotion towards the music industry. The dream of this musical ride shaped into reality on 29th September 2024 in Abu Dhabi, when the studio was inaugurated. We are also ecstatic to witness it getting blessed by AR Rahman!

It’s been an inspiring partnership to work with Zariya, especially a talented singer like Ayisha – you too can get to know about her here: ayishaabdulbasith.com. We wish the team all the best for their journey, and if you too are an aspiring musician, Zariya Creative Media is the place for you to build your community. If you are looking for story weavers for your brand, then we have something for you in the store. Explore now!