We founded Zurnal back in 2015 as a project producing mainly self-development diaries and notebooks. Most of our finances in the begining came from crowdfunding platforms such as Startlab or HITHIT which was unique for this kind of a product. Our products were always sourced and made locally in Slovakia or Czech Republic.
During my 7 years at the company we produced 13 iterated collections of our diaries. Each one was an updated version of the previous. The changes were usually based on customer feedback and UX research.
Every member of our small team had different responsibilities. I was the sole designer of DTP, UX, social media and packaging materials. I also participated in most of our production processes communicating directly with our printing house. I left the company in 2023 to pursue new challenges.
We changed logos together 3 times during 7 years all due to the evolution of our brand.
We also used local fonts from slovak type foundry - Setup type. Ondrej Job was really helpful and together we came up with The Font - unique typeface based on his original Ocarina. The Font contained geometrical punctuiation and few slightly modded characters. Ocarina stayed as the main workhorse while The Font became the typeface used in headlines and in all the logos.
Most of the brand colours are subtle and elegant due to the premium price range of our products. The accent color is red.
Elegant and minimal design is transformed also into the interior of Zurnal products.
NEW PACKAGING
In the summer of 2022 I developed a new packaging design with its own system based on the type of a product. The three elements on the right side are icons of layout, dating (year, half-year, none) and type (diary, plain notebook).
