He Designed Starbucks' Mongolian Logo, and Not Only for Starbucks | 100 People With Ideas

Tengis Type runs loosely — more a gathering of enthusiasts, an independent workshop.

Tengis, who founded the studio Tengis Type, has been busy lately. His article Designing the Mongolian Wordmark for Starbucks took off on Moments. It is pure theory, technical enough to be hard going, and it still passed 5,000 reads in short order — the combination of "Mongolian script plus Starbucks" was too good to pass up.

In his interview with QDaily, Tengis spoke slowly and in a low voice. He is Mongolian, born and raised in Inner Mongolia, and after finishing graduate school he taught courses in visual design at Hohhot Minzu College. He set up Tengis Type a long time ago, at a point when pure fine art felt too limiting to him; that, plus his own love of Mongolian typefaces and symbols, is what started the studio.

On the Tengis Type website you can see several collaborators: Tengis, the studio's founder and draftsman; Talaa, who holds a doctorate in the history of Mongolian script; Chimbai, an illustrator and designer; and Dai Xian, the copy editor and design assistant.

Some of Tengis Type's work

But Tengis says the studio actually runs loosely, more like a "gathering of enthusiasts" and an independent workshop. Most of the time the members are scattered across China, and some work abroad; only when a project comes in do they gather, divide up the work, and explore the ground between design and fine art together. The Starbucks job he did alone, in a month, though the commission goes back a year earlier. Starbucks was preparing to enter the Inner Mongolia market, and on the type-design site Type is beautiful the company came across Tengis Type, which specializes in Mongolian script. It hired the studio to design the Mongolian wordmark for its shopfront signs.

The contract at the time asked Tengis Type to design only the single word "STARBUCKS," but Tengis extended it into a complete Mongolian typeface. Even two words, he felt, need a systematic logic behind them; a full typeface also makes the brand easier to extend elsewhere.

The original Starbucks Coffee wordmark in English, and Freight Sans Black

He named the new letterforms Buck Sans. The uppercase "STARBUCKS" uses a sans-serif of the kind common in the restaurant trade, but the lowercase cannot be traced to any source. Tengis took a similar face, Freight Sans Black, as his reference and drew out of it this rather stiff Buck Sans, dropping the humanist shapes of Freight Sans Black's lowercase.

Buck Sans Modern set as text

The hardest part of the work was making the letters look good on their own and still look good set in a long stretch of text. Once Sans Black had taken shape, he went back and adjusted the details.

Stroke order differs between the uppercase and lowercase forms

One more detail came out of the process. In the English name Starbucks, "star" is translated by meaning into xing, the Chinese word for star, and "bucks" is transliterated by sound as bake; together they make the Chinese name Xingbake. While he was designing the Mongolian, Tengis proposed that it match Starbucks Coffee directly. The suggestion was not taken: the Mongolian matches the Chinese Xingbake instead. A layer of Chinese, in other words, sits between the Mongolian and the English. Tengis regrets it. Not as bad as getting the Mongolian language wrong, he says, but still a small deviation in how the original name is transliterated.

The version transliterating the Chinese name Xingbake

The version transliterating Starbucks Coffee directly

Starbucks Coffee multilingual layout

Mongolian script set with Starbucks Coffee in uppercase

Once Tengis delivered the design, Starbucks had a wordmark in three languages: English, Mongolian and Chinese. In January 2014 the first Starbucks in Hohhot opened, and the Tengis Type wordmark went up on the shopfront. As for Starbucks itself, the speed of its expansion is genuinely striking. It has opened more than 1,600 stores in 91 cities on the Chinese mainland, and those stores draw more than 3 million visits a week. Beyond the first- and second-tier cities, it is pushing into newer ones. By 2019 it expects to have 3,400 stores in China.

Talking with QDaily, Tengis said he worries that pure Mongolian, already at the cultural margins, is getting weaker. Design in China is immature across the board, never mind the design of Mongolian script. It is the same for every minority script: the people who speak the language have to learn how to bring traditional letterform design together with modern commerce. That, he believes, is one of the ways a pure minority script stays alive, and one of the few outlets it has.

Cover image from Tengis Type