Exqulux

Overview

Exqulux is a luxury leather label. Its products sell on touch and scent before sight, so the identity had to match that material quality without upstaging the goods. Premium leather calls for a small, cleanly embossed mark, not a loud logo.

The challenge

The mark had to work in three settings:

• Embossed on leather, with no fine detail or tight counters that a 2mm debossing die would collapse.
• Printed on paper, staying elegant on a business card and holding up at favicon size.
• Inside a ribbon, because the packaging uses a folded ribbon handle that passes through the mark.

Approach

We spent the first round on the X alone. The final glyph is a rounded X with soft, bracketed terminals that feel stitched rather than stamped. It leaves enough negative space that embossing doesn't fill it in. The brief asked for something that reflected "the softness and premium quality of leather".

The wordmark is set in Bodoni Cyrillic, in caps with generous tracking. It comes in three lockups: a stacked primary, a horizontal version for letterheads and bag handles, and the X on its own for anything below 20mm.

The palette is wine red (#45080C) as the hero colour, gold (#D4AF37) reserved for foil stamping, and near-black (#1A1A1A), with a few pale tints used as background paper. There are three typefaces: Lora for body text, Karla for UI, and Bodoni Cyrillic for the wordmark only.

The whole system is documented on a single tall guideline sheet. Paper-bag packaging was the first real-world test, with three renders: eye-level through the ribbon handle, a top-down flat lay, and an angled hero shot.

We delivered:

• 12 logo PNGs (three lockups in four colourways).
• 9 profile crops.
• Illustrator and SVG source files.
• Three bag mockups.
• The guideline PDF.

We didn't design the leather goods or the website.

Outcome

The project went from first sketch to a signed-off brand guideline sheet in 10 days.