Canoe & kayak rentalIdentity study
An A that
sets sail.
00The project
- Brand
- Rent-A-Yak, canoe and kayak rental
- Year
- 2023
- Status
- Design study, not a commission
An identity study for a canoe and kayak rental. The idea sits in the middle of the name — the A of Rent-A-Yak — and the symbol is that letter: a heavy A with a sail and a hull cut into it, floating on two broken lines of water. A bold wordmark and one plain line, “Canoe and Kayak Rental”, do the rest.
- Symbol
- Wordmark and lockups
- Colour
- Social post layouts
01The symbol
A for the name,
a sail for the water.
The A is cut, not drawn on. A thin mast runs up the middle; to its left, a triangle of sail; across the foot, a hull that tips slightly to the right, as a boat does under wind. Below the letter, six dashes in two rows — some long, the shortest no more than a dot — are the water. Every edge is a straight line, so the symbol holds in one colour and at small sizes.
At 18 pixels the sail and the hull still read
The symbol is the vector path from the 2023 file, unaltered; guides measured from the path
02Wordmark and colour
Set heavy,
read from the shore.
The 2023 boards pair the A with RENT-A-YAK in a heavy, widely spaced sans, and a light line beneath: “Canoe and Kayak Rental”. There are two arrangements — stacked, with the A on top, and side by side. The colours come from the same posts: the deep blue of a lake seen from above, the green-blue of the shallows, and the red of the kayak itself.
- Deep lake#023F55
- Shallows#0B6E77
- Kayak red#D9343F
- Shore#F3F1EA
The wordmark’s typeface did not survive in the source file and is re-set here in Inter; the four colours are sampled from the 2023 posts
03Social posts
One word,
as big as it goes.
The posts for the web, Instagram, WeChat and Xiaohongshu run on one idea: a single word — KAYAK or CANOE — set as large as the frame allows, the lockup tucked into a corner; and one view from above, a single boat on open water. The originals sat on stock photographs; here the photographs give way to the brand’s own material — the word set larger still, the A in a deeper tone, its water lines — and the kayak is drawn flat.
Re-set from the 2023 post layouts (web 16:9, Xiaohongshu 3:4, Instagram 1:1); where the stock photographs were, the word, the A and its water lines are set larger, and the kayak is redrawn flat