The Death Stranding logo is quite original and a bit creepy. Behind it lies the idea of risk, struggle, danger, and death. The emblem creates a feeling of night, downpour, and streams of mud, because, having embarked on the path of war, no one can leave clean.
Death Stranding: Brand overview
Founded: | November 8, 2019 |
Founder: | Kojima Productions |
Meaning and History
Hideo Kojima is the scriptwriter, producer, game designer, and project manager. The idea to create Death Stranding came to him after rethinking the novel “Rope,” which was written by his favorite author Kōbō Abe. Kojima Productions’ owner read this piece while still in school but remembered well the plot’s basic idea, built on the “philosophy” of ropes and sticks. It said that primitive man used a stick for protection and a rope to hold important and useful things.
The gameplay of Death Stranding is tied on the same principle: the main character must go through a path full of obstacles, driving away all the bad from himself with a conventional “stick” and pulling the good with a “rope.” Its goal is to deliver the cargo from point “A” to point “B.” The post-apocalyptic universe is made up of isolated settlements, and the only connection between them is such couriers.
What is Death Stranding?
Death Stranding is a computer game set in a post-apocalyptic world. The protagonist is Sam Porter Bridges – a courier forced to travel through dangerous territories to deliver cargo to survivors. Along the way, he encounters various supernatural creatures and natural catastrophes. The action game was released in 2019 and was initially available only on PlayStation 4. Kojima Productions created it.
The name of the video game has a non-obvious meaning. On the one hand, it can be understood as “beaching.” The teaser, for example, clearly reveals the topic of throwing marine life on a sandbank. Alternatively, the word “strand” can denote attachments and connections because it is used in psychology in this very context. This interpretation explains why long black cables or umbilical cords were drawn from the trailer’s creatures’ bodies.
By the way, the same “ropes” are on the Death Stranding logo: they hang from the letters, getting lost in space. The lack of tension indicates that the threads are broken. This is also symbolic because the main character will have to restore connections between post-apocalyptic cities.
The game was announced at Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016. Especially for this event, the developer prepared a teaser in which attentive viewers noticed the project’s logo: the inscription “DEATH STRANDING” with black vertical lines. The wordmark looks unusual: the designers managed to make it minimalistic and emphasize the atmosphere of doom.
The stripes going from “E”, “A”, “T”, “S”, “T”, “I”, “N”, “G” have a philosophical meaning. As mentioned, this is an allusion to the tie ropes from the novel Kōbō Abe. But one fan saw a deeper meaning in them. He counted the total number of threads (8) and letters (11) and decided that this was a hint of the game’s release date: November 8th. The theory is hardly true, although from Hideo Kojima, a big fan of ciphers and riddles, you can expect anything.
Font and Colors
The logo uses the same font used for the other labels in the trailer. It is similar to both Calder LC and Brocha Light at the same time. The first grotesque was designed by Mariya V. Pigoulevskaya and released in 2016 by The Northern Block. The second typeface is Latinotype. This is a creation by typographer Jorge Cisterna, inspired by the pre-Columbian art of Easter Island. The final version of Brocha Light appeared in 2015.
Both fonts combine thin, authentic letters with clear lines. The lettering looks good in black, with the designers choosing the darkest shade (# 000000). The blank white background helped the developers focus on the main thing – the symbolic name Death Stranding.
Death Stranding color codes
Black | Hex color: | #000000 |
---|---|---|
RGB: | 0 0 0 | |
CMYK: | 0 0 0 100 | |
Pantone: | PMS Process Black C |