Swoop, there it is!
Landyachtz is a lifestyle products company best known for producing soft-wheel skateboards. The Landyachtz name is synonymous with purpose-built design, high-quality components, and clean aesthetics. It is also synonymous with myriad mispronunciations ranging from near misses such as “Land yacht” to examples that are tragically incomprehensible. “Randy Aughts” is a staff favorite.
As Landyachtz began to capture new global markets, they wanted to develop branding assets that would make their name easy to recognize, remember, and repeat. It was imperative that this new logo, wordmark, or monogram had to express the joy of skateboarding; elevate all of the products, webpages, social posts, and print media that it touched; and be unmistakably recognized as Landyachtz.
Deconstruction
Landyachtz’ previous Art Director had already started experimenting with breaking the word into two parts.
Reduction
It was bravery, laziness, or both that drove us to ask the big question, “Why so many letters? Do we need entire words?” After we deleted 80% of the letters from Landyachtz, we were left with the only two that really mattered, LY.
Zzz
You may be wondering about the “Z”. Landyachtz was created in 1997, a time when people creating brands and companies changed the letter “s” to “z” to be cool. There is no question that the Z is a significant part of the Landyachtz name and brand recognition. But, when we started to explore options for abbreviations, we drew the following conclusions:
LZ - Looks like a state in the USA. Pronounced El-zee, but maybe Lay-zee.
LYZ - Looks like an airport designation. Definitely pronounced Lay-Zee.