Tricycle magazine 30th Anniversary cover design

Established in 1990 The Tricycle Foundation is a nonprofit educational organisation, dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practises broadly available. In 1991 they launched Tricycle, the first magazine intended to present Buddhist perspectives to a Western readership. They approached design studio Superfried to develop the cover design for their 30th Anniversary issue.

Predictably the cover would need to typographically convey the number 30. Initial thoughts were immediately drawn to the spiritual symbol Om, since this already looked very similar to the required numbers. An alternative idea was a literal representation of the Tricycle as a typographic illustration, with the wheels representing the numerals. A third route was to simply make use of lotus flower petals to render the 3 + 0.

After careful consideration, the Tricycle route was selected and taken forward for further refinement. This involved the addition of styling to emphasise the Buddhist content via the triple Ying + Yang wheel nuts and Dharma wheel style spokes. A palette of gold, white and black had been previously selected, so numerous colour permutations of the design were tested. After the illustration was complete, additional simplified logo versions were developed to be used at smaller scale for marketing the birthday issue.