The Nabu Studios logo: an orange star built from small squares, beside the word NABU.
The finished lockup, as the brand book draws it.
All work
Our own brand · Case study

Nabu Studios

We spent two evenings perfecting a funnel, then drew a star instead. Here's why, and why its squares are a little uneven on purpose.

Areas
Media
Who worked on it
Raghad, Awab, Ali al-Hilali
When
July to October 2026
Where
Baghdad, Iraq

A mark with three jobs

We work in three areas: media, software and growth. The name is borrowed from Nabu, the Mesopotamian god of scribes and writing.1

Before anyone drew a thing, we filled in a brand questionnaire about ourselves. Two answers set the brief. The look should be modern, with traditional cultural influences. And it must not look like just a marketing agency, or just a software company.

A mark built on one of those areas would tell a third of our story, and we'd spend forever explaining the other two.

Our first try, in clay

Our first logo, in July, was a terracotta clay tablet holding four cuneiform wedges, with the A of NABU cut as a wedge. One glance and you thought Mesopotamia.

It was also deep and dull. Earthy, heavy, and closer to a museum case than to a studio that builds software. We kept the wedge and let the rest go.

The July logo: a terracotta tile with four cream wedges pointing down, beside the word NABU and STUDIOS in spaced capitals.
July 2026: the clay tablet, our first go.

Fifteen directions, one evening

On September 3 we reopened the question and went through fifteen directions in a single evening.

Four put an eagle front and center: assembled from wedges, stepped like a ziggurat, carved in relief, drawn in one line. Five paired color and type with a quieter mark, sometimes a single wedge, sometimes no mark at all. Six drew cuneiform in pixels: the wedge, the basic stroke of cuneiform, rebuilt from the smallest unit of a screen.2

Only the pixel set felt like us.

Eagle

  • An eagle built from cuneiform wedges, in terracotta and ink.
    Scribe
  • A stepped eagle whose wings step down like a ziggurat, in fired-brick red.
    Ziggurat
  • A frontal eagle carved like an Assyrian relief, inside a clay medallion.
    Relief
  • An eagle drawn in one continuous line, beside a lowercase wordmark.
    Studio

Color and type

  • A single cuneiform wedge used as the mark, in terracotta on cream.
    Clay and Ink
  • A wordmark on deep ink where a horizontal wedge replaces the letter A.
    Night Scribe
  • A wordmark with one wedge resting on a baseline, like a stylus on a tablet, in moss and silt.
    Reed and Silt
  • A wedge turned into a soft pin inside a coin, in cobalt, coral and lime.
    Bazaar
  • Three strokes forming a letter N, with wedge heads on the first and last.
    Ochre Studio

Pixel cuneiform

  • A single wedge drawn in pixels, with a triangular tip, in terracotta.
    Stylus
  • A letter N drawn from three pixel wedges, in ochre on ink.
    Ligature N
  • A square tablet with four wedge signs pressed into it, drawn in fine pixels.
    Tablet
  • Three vertical pixel wedges with terracotta heads, standing for build, market and grow.
    Three
  • A wedge made of round dots like stylus marks, in oxblood.
    Impress
  • A funnel-shaped wedge made of small white squares on a cobalt tile.
    Lattice

A funnel, of all things

We picked Lattice: a wedge drawn as a grid of small squares, shaped like a funnel. The wedge is the stroke every cuneiform sign is made of. The funnel is the shape every marketer draws. One mark, two histories.3

Then we spent two evenings pushing it as far as it would go.

The Lattice board: the funnel mark on a cobalt tile, the wordmark, a headline, a repeating pattern of the mark, and three color swatches.
The Lattice board, September 2026. Each direction was shown like this: the mark, the word, a pattern and the colors.
  1. The Lattice funnel: white squares on cobalt.
    Lattice, where it started.
  2. A chunkier version of the funnel with larger squares.
    Chunkier and more 8-bit. It started to read as a letter T, or a Greek column, so the head became a funnel with a point.
  3. Four renderings of the same funnel: stairs, dots, scanlines and dither.
    The same shape drawn ten ways; four of them here.
  4. A solid funnel in cream squares on terracotta, with a tail that tapers to a point.
    Bolder squares, solid, with a tail that tapers to a point.
  5. Four versions of the funnel with an extra stroke added: a hook, a crossing bar, a second wedge, a base line.
    Extra strokes to make it read more like script. They looked like decoration, so out they went.
  6. A letter N built from thirty-six small funnels.
    An N built from thirty-six small funnels.
  7. The word NABU spelled in bitmap letters, each square a small funnel.
    The whole word, spelled in funnels.
  8. The funnel drawn as hollow cells, with the cuneiform signs for Nabu sitting inside its head.
    Nabu's name in cuneiform, 𒀭𒀝, written inside the squares.
A diagram of the marketing funnel in four bands: awareness, interest, desire, action.
The marketing funnel, the shape the mark borrowed from.Source: Si Quan Ong, “The Marketing Funnel: What It Is, How It Works, & How to Create One”, Ahrefs Blog, 2023.
  • A hand sketch of three wedges above the word NABU.

    Three wedges over the word, sketched on an iPad.

  • A line drawing of a triangular wedge with one curved side, with construction handles.

    A single wedge, constructed with curves.

  • A black sign made of wedge strokes, shaped like a pointer.

    A pointer built from wedge strokes.

  • A stylus-like mark made of squares beside the word NABU in square pixel letters.

    A pixel stylus beside a pixel NABU.

Roads we sketched and didn't take.

Why the funnel had to go

Every version of the funnel told the same story: marketing. We also make media and build software, and a funnel has nothing to say about either.

The way out came from the last thing we tried on it: writing Nabu's name in cuneiform inside its squares. The name begins with 𒀭, dingir, the sign scribes wrote before the name of a god.4 It's one of the oldest signs in cuneiform, read as “god” and as “heaven”. And it's an eight-pointed star.

The star belongs to the name, not to any one service. Eight points don't point one way, which suits a studio that does more than one thing. Drawn in squares, it's plainly made for a screen. So we stopped polishing the funnel and started drawing the star.

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Craft

108 squares, spaced by eye

Raghad drew the star by hand, one square at a time, 108 squares in all. First we tried perfect spacing: every gap the same, every square on one grid. It was correct, and it looked like a machine made it. So we spaced it by eye.

Along the straight arms, the gap between squares is a third of a square.5 In the triangular heads it opens to nearly half, so the heads look lighter than the stems. The two arms on the left turn their squares to follow the diagonal, while the others step like stairs. The east arm stops short of the other straight arms.

None of this follows a rule. It's closer to a scribe's hand in clay, which never presses the same stroke quite the same way twice. That's why the uneven version won.

Even: every gap equal. Redrawn for this page from the same 108 squares.
As drawn: the spacing we kept.
One arm up close.
  1. One square.
  2. A gap of a third of a square, along the arms.
  3. A gap of nearly half a square, in the heads.
A photograph of a screen showing the star drawn in small black squares, beside the start of the word NABU.
The star in progress, photographed off the screen.
Craft

The word stays plain

Along the way we set NABU in about a dozen typefaces, among them Manrope, Syne, Archivo, Instrument Serif, Unbounded, Pixelify Sans and Bricolage Grotesque. We also drew the word itself in pixels, first from small funnels, then as square letters next to the star. Two pixel shapes side by side fought for the eye.6 The mark already carries the pixels, so the word could stay plain.

We settled on Bricolage Grotesque Light, stretched to 116 percent of its width.7 That's the weight the brand book draws. The website's design sets the word in Bold, which is the version in this page's header. The light weight keeps the letters from bullying the fine squares of the star. The stretch gives a short, four-letter word enough breadth to sit beside a mark that is almost square.

In the lockup the capitals stand nine squares tall, about three tenths of the star's height. Side by side, the word sits 4.3 squares from the star. Stacked, it sits 5.7 squares below it. Running text is set in Lato for English and Zain for Arabic.8

The word NABU set in eight typefaces: Manrope, Syne, Archivo Black, Instrument Serif, Unbounded, Pixelify Sans, Gloock and Bricolage Grotesque Light.
Some of the typefaces we tried. The last one, Bricolage Grotesque Light stretched to 116 percent, is the one we kept.
A photograph of a screen showing the star with the word NABU in pixel letters, and below it the star with NABU in a plain sans, on white and on black.
The word in pixels against the word in a plain sans, photographed off the screen.
The horizontal lockup: the orange star on the left, the word NABU on the right.
Side by side.
  1. Capitals: nine squares tall, about three tenths of the star.
  2. 4.3 squares between star and word.
The stacked lockup: the orange star above the word NABU.
Stacked.
  1. Capitals: nine squares tall, about three tenths of the star.
  2. 5.7 squares between star and word.

Clay, with the lights on

The terracotta came from clay, and it looked like clay: deep, dull, earthy. On a phone, among everything else shouting for attention, it went quiet. So we kept the warmth and turned up the brightness.9

The new orange, #f55312, is fired clay lit from behind, the way a screen lights a color. We use it sparingly: the mark, small markers, the underline under a link.

Sand, #e6dbcc, is unfired clay, the color of a tablet before the stylus touches it. Taupe, #a79788, carries rules and the quieter text. Black does the writing.

July

  • Terracotta
    #b05c2e
  • Clay
    #e8b489

Now

  • Orange
    #f55312
  • Sand
    #e6dbcc
  • Taupe
    #a79788
  • Black
    #000000

The kit we ended up with

The finished identity is a small kit: a horizontal lockup, a stacked one and the star on its own, each in orange, black and white, across four grounds.

The same squares draw a set of 32 cuneiform signs that we use as icons and quiet decoration. And on this site's home page, point at the star and it breaks into its 108 squares. Move away and it pulls itself back together.

A brand book page showing the lockup on four bands: taupe, orange, black and sand.
The lockup on the four brand colors.
A brand book page showing the horizontal lockup, the stacked lockup and the star alone, in black and in orange, on sand.
Logo versions on sand.
A brand book page of thirty-two cuneiform signs drawn in small orange squares on black.
Thirty-two cuneiform signs, drawn in the same squares as the star.

Sources and further reading

9

Numbered in the order they appear. Entries marked Further reading are research and methods that match choices on this page; we read some of them afterwards.

  1. Further reading

    1

    Tudeau, J. (2019). Nabu (god). Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses. Oracc and the UK Higher Education Academy.

    A scholarly profile of Nabu: patron of scribes, god of writing and wisdom, whose emblem was a single wedge standing for the scribe's stylus.

    oracc.museum.upenn.eduBack to the text

  2. Further reading

    2

    Robson, E. (2025). Wedges and signs. Knowledge and Power: Cuneiform Revealed. Higher Education Academy, hosted on Oracc.

    A plain introduction to how cuneiform was written: every sign is built from wedges pressed into clay with a reed stylus.

    oracc.museum.upenn.eduBack to the text

  3. Further reading

    3

    Strong, E. K., Jr. (1925). Theories of selling. Journal of Applied Psychology, 9(1), 75-86.

    A 1925 article that credits the advertiser E. St. Elmo Lewis with the steps of attention, interest, desire and action, the stages a marketing funnel still draws.

    doi.orgBack to the text

  4. Further reading

    4

    Robson, E. (2012). Categories of signs. Knowledge and Power: Cuneiform Revealed. Higher Education Academy, hosted on Oracc.

    Explains that the star sign was written, unspoken, before a god's name, and also stood for the words “god” and “heaven”.

    oracc.museum.upenn.eduBack to the text

  5. Further reading

    5

    Wagemans, J., Elder, J. H., Kubovy, M., Palmer, S. E., Peterson, M. A., Singh, M., & von der Heydt, R. (2012). A century of Gestalt psychology in visual perception: I. Perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. Psychological Bulletin, 138(6), 1172-1217.

    A review of a century of research on how the eye groups what it sees: things placed close together read as one shape, which is how small gaps let 108 squares read as one star.

    doi.orgBack to the text

  6. Further reading

    6

    Reber, R., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 364-382.

    Reviews evidence that people find a design more pleasing the more easily they can take it in, with clear figures, strong contrast and symmetry all helping.

    doi.orgBack to the text

  7. What we worked from

    7

    Triay, M. (2022). Bricolage Grotesque [typeface]. Google Fonts, SIL Open Font License.

    The typeface of the NABU wordmark, designed by Mathieu Triay and free to use under the SIL Open Font License.

    fonts.google.comBack to the text

  8. What we worked from

    8

    Dziedzic, Ł. (2010). Lato [typeface]. Google Fonts. Boutros Fonts (2024). Zain [typeface]. Google Fonts. Both SIL Open Font License.

    The two typefaces for running text, Lato by Łukasz Dziedzic for English and Zain by Boutros Fonts for Arabic, both free under the SIL Open Font License.

    fonts.google.comBack to the text

  9. Further reading

    9

    Labrecque, L. I., & Milne, G. R. (2012). Exciting red and competent blue: The importance of color in marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 40(5), 711-727.

    Four studies on color in branding, one of which shows that a color's saturation and lightness, not only its hue, strengthen the personality a brand projects.

    doi.orgBack to the text

“Nabu, the Mesopotamian god of writing and wisdom, is where our story begins.”
From the Nabu Studios brand book.
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