Founded in 1986, Takasago-Seika is a Sembei (Japanese rice cracker) company in Saitama, Japan. The company makes high quality products with local ingredients.

Their new identity design needed to incorporate the Japanese sense, but something distinctive from the often-seen Japanese calligraphy style used by other sembei companies.

In early project discussions it became obvious how important “face”, because their corporate motto is “making products with visible face” which means customers can trace the producers of all the ingredients. And also, Mr. Orihara, the CEO of Takasago, said “Crackers are always with people. When they are happy, sad, angry, when they are having fun(喜怒哀楽).”

I symbolized “高” (the first letter of the company’s name in Japanese) as a human face, inspired from Noh (能) masks which are used in Noh plays to express all the feelings. Actually, the name “Takasago” comes from a Noh play with same name. In that play, a Japanese pine tree, which represents “high quality” in Japan,  is used symbolically. The logo system works to express all the emotion by changing the shape of the mouth.