Nyoni: an identity refresh, a logo animation and this website

Nyoni’s first logo had a strong idea: a weaver bird pulling a golden thread into a camera aperture that doubles as the O in the name. But it was drawn on black and only worked on black. On a white page, the weaver lost its black face mask, because the mask was never drawn: it was the black background showing through. The yellow was a pure screen yellow that can’t be printed accurately, and there were no files for small sizes, one-colour printing or app icons.

The studio was also moving from a small-business menu to organisations, so the website had to change completely.

Keep the idea, fix the drawing. The geometry of the original artwork was kept exactly. We added the weaver’s face mask as a real shape, so the bird reads correctly on any background, and moved the colours from screen yellow to a deeper weaver gold that prints well and sits next to the blue-black ink of the new palette.

Build the kit. Ten logo variants (full colour, reversed, one-colour ink and white, a compact mark, the bird alone), every favicon and app-icon size, and a one-colour version where the eye is knocked out so it works in single-colour print.

Animate it in Blender. The logo parts were brought into Blender at their exact positions. The thread draws itself as a real 3D strand, the aperture blades turn into place, the weaver lands and takes the thread, and the name settles. The bird and letters stay flat so the animation is faithful to the logo; only the gold catches the light.

Rebuild the website for a different audience, with published prices, accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA, and a dashboard for editing everything without code.

A logo that works on every background and at every size, a five-second animation that weighs under 200 KB on the web, and the site you’re reading now.