Because places are always more than their postcards

You’ve all seen this; the story of a place getting limited to its postcard version until everything outside the postcard frame gets overlooked, forgotten and finally rejected as not of that place. Where we practice in Sri Lanka, this postcardification of places happens quite often in tourist towns that slowly lose the layers of their identity and become flattened.

Sri Lanka’s South Coast, which repeatedly enters ‘world’s best places to visit’ lists, is one of those. Its stories are saturated with images of beaches and coconut palms, surfboards, people silhouetted against sunsets dissolving into the sea.

Yes, there’s a reason why tropes exist. The palms, surfboards and sunsets are all true often enough. Tropes can be useful too; we don’t discard them entirely because they cater to expectations and sometimes even help make a business more approachable and familiar. But our role as commercial creators is not just to manage expectations; it’s also to create culture. Limiting the stories of a place to only its tropes reduces and flattens it, leaving out microcultures and environments that colour its reality much richer than its postcards.

A few years ago, we stumbled on a fragment of a South Coast story in a vintage devotional print from India. It depicts a scene from the Hindu epic Ramayana that’s interestingly concurrent with Sri Lankan mythology; Hanuman, the monkey god, crosses into Lanka carrying a part of the Himalayas mountain containing a life-saving medicine for his fallen warrior friend. Sri Lankan folklore says Himalayan fragments fell along the journey, forming several places across the island; most famously, Rumassala hill in the South Coast of the island, in Unawatuna. Even the etymology of the name ‘Unawatuna’ points to the Sinhala words ‘Onna-watuna’ (there it fell). The hillock’s unusual flora and long association with medicinal plants continue to keep the story alive, somewhere between mythology and possibility.

We wanted to bring this print into contact with circles that visit the south coast of Sri Lanka. Being a richly coloured chromolithograph, its visual language stands out distinctly against the homogenized, elegantly muted ‘coastal fantasy’ aesthetics of Sri Lanka’s southern seaside belt. This is precisely why we were drawn to it. It introduces a layer of cultural curiosity to a flattened representation of Southern Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka’s South Coast carries layered histories shaped by trade, migration, mythology, religion, language, and centuries of cultural exchange. Those stories deserve visual space too. Places are rarely as singular as tourism imagery makes them seem. Do we think Hanuman alone symbolizes Unawatuna? No. But we do think it adds a layer to the symbols, stories, and visual references that form part of a richer and more truthful identity for Sri Lanka’s South Coast.

This is how we test stories

This print is essentially a hypothesis of a story we believe has earned its place in the cultural landscape of a destination. We publish and sell stories like this through our store, and the commercial side of that matters: it gives us useful information on which stories resonate and which ones don’t find their audience. They tell us what people choose to take home, to frame, to give as gifts; that’s a form of cultural response that no focus group can replicate, and this is what we use to help our studio clients make products, spaces and experiences that actually work.

This is where our publishing work and our studio work inform one another. The objects, prints and booklets we put into the world are always tests of culture-making. They let us watch how a story travels, whether it lands with the traveller who knows the mythology, or the one who’s simply drawn to the image before understanding why. Whether it finds the diaspora or the curious outsider first. What questions it raises in the room it ends up in.

That intelligence shapes how we work with clients in travel and retail; brands building experiences around place. The risk we see most often in that work is the same risk the postcard represents: a compression of culture into its most frictionless version. Easier to sell, maybe. But harder to remember, and ultimately less true.

We’re also curious about something else: what does it feel like to encounter an image from your own culture, recognized and held with significance somewhere else? As more Indian travellers arrive in Sri Lanka, some specifically along the Ramayana trail, that question feels increasingly relevant. We’ll have an answer after a few seasons of testing this story out. That testing, in a way, is the point.

We’re drawn to stories that complicate a place slightly, that give people something to turn over in their minds. We don’t set out to create complexity for its own sake, but we welcome truthful layers that make a destination understood through people, beliefs, nature, ideas, and history rather than a Pinterest board. The ‘Hanuman in Lanka’ print is a small test of that idea. Hanuman in Lanka is now available in our store, as a cotton-mix, direct-to-film printed T-shirt. And we’re watching to see what it teaches us. We’ll tell you more when we find out.

The struggle with contentment

Some wholesome negativity and why contentment is not a popular feature in commercial stories

The other day, a squirrel made me realize how small my human existence is. It was napping content on a mango branch; the rounded belly pressed against the tree told me that it had had its fill of April mangoes. The squirrel was done for the day. I, on the other hand, was not done. I don’t stop just because today’s meal is sorted. I go on. My today’s needs were met a long time ago, but I go on because I want more things with very logical reasons to them. On one hand, I have greater security than the squirrel, I assure myself. But, do I?, I half wonder, looking at the unread alerts that NewsWire has for me; probably about wars, fuel shortage, the oncoming El Niño drought and so on. The squirrel slept on contentedly. It will rise later and go on to hide somewhere as the sun sets, while I continue to work. I’m grateful for my good life, and I’m often happy. But I’m rarely content. I’m rarely stilled, wanting nothing more than the present. I am hardly ever embedded in a complete moment in time. And just for that sheer distinction, I was fairly certain that the squirrel was happier than I was with all my human gravity.

This got me thinking about contentment, one of the most overlooked states of mind. The more I looked into it, the more I found that the human species has a particularly challenged relationship with contentment.

Less of an emotion, more of a knowing.

Emotions are reactions; they are evoked in response to something outside you; they peak and subside. Contentment doesn’t behave that way. It has no spike. It generates no urgency. Psychologist Daniel Cordaro, who led the Contentment Lab at Yale and spent years studying emotional expression across cultures, found that contentment is the only positive state that requires no external input whatsoever. Every other good feeling is, in some sense, a response. Contentment is a position, a form of inner conviction. This is probably why most philosophies explain it as ‘a knowing’.

Language is always a good place to start exploring how the collective understands or defines an idea. For contentment, Sinhala gives us truptiya, from the Sanskrit tṛpti, the sensation of being quenched, filled, satiated. It is the same root used for the satisfaction of drinking when genuinely thirsty, and for spiritual fulfilment. Tamil Mana-niravu is a compound word combining manathu (mind/heart) and niravu (relief/completion), literally translating to “fullness of the heart or mind”. The English contentment comes from the Latin contentus, a term originally applied to vessels. Cups, barrels, containers that are full and therefore closed to anything more. When the word migrated from objects to people, it carried that logic with it: a contented person is one who is complete, intact, needing no addition. The Sanskrit santosha means much the same: acceptance of the whole of it.

The Bhutanese word ‘chok shay’, comes from one of the least contacted villages on earth; it translates directly as “the knowledge of enough.” Not the feeling of enough, but the knowledge. In Chinese, the Taoist concept zhī zú carries the identical construction: knowing sufficiency. As Tao Te Ching wisely says, “the one who knows they have enough, is rich.”

The Pali word santhutti appears in one of the most quoted Buddhist statements, “contentment is the highest wealth,” valuing it more than any possession or accomplishment.

What all of these philosophies and cultures understood, and what modern psychology is now confirming, is that contentment is not a feeling that comes, peaks, and goes. It’s a form of knowledge and a recognition that can be cultivated.

The thing is, contentment isn’t profitable.

As a commercial writer, my studio gets requests for stories designed to create inspiration or enjoyment, nostalgia, desire, intrigue, and even amusement. But rarely do people ask for stories of contentment. In media and entertainment, too contentment is not popular.

There is a good reason contentment does not appear in advertising: it cannot. An advertisement that genuinely produced contentment in its viewer would be the last advertisement that the viewer ever needed. Contentment closes the loop. It is the state in which nothing is lacking, and an economy premised on manufactured lack cannot survive contact with a population that has sincerely arrived there.

This is not a modern pathology so much as a modern design. Economist Thorstein Veblen described, as far back as 1899, how the opposite of contentment creates perpetual upward social comparison and a restless calibration of one’s position against others. He termed it conspicuous consumption. To keep selling, desire should not be satisfied, but just routinely upgraded.

Commercial stories, the kind that moves product or service, run on six or seven reliable emotional engines: desire, aspiration, nostalgia, belonging, fear of missing out, wonder, amusement. Contentment is not among them, and cannot be. It is a way of seeing that, if successfully created, ends the transaction.

But, I do think there’s room for contentment in commercial stories; that’s the next one up in our guides; the Utopian, one of the 12 Jungian archetypes we use in our studio methodology to construct brand personas.

Is contentment even biologically compatible?

If contentment is so universally prized across cultures, so carefully named and so precisely defined, the obvious question is why it remains so rare. One reason is economic, as above. But there is another reason: contentment may be rare because evolution did not prioritize it. We are, in a very specific biological sense, built for discontent.

The human brain’s default mode is not rest but vigilance. The negativity bias, the well-documented tendency to weigh threats more heavily than equivalent rewards, is not a flaw in the system but its original purpose. In an environment where the cost of missing a predator vastly outweighed the cost of missing a fruit, the brain that kept scanning, kept worrying, kept projecting forward, survived. The brain that settled into satisfaction was, in the ancestral environment, the brain that got eaten.

This creates a precise paradox. The very cognitive machinery that allowed us humans to dominate every ecosystem it entered, like restless problem-solving, insatiable curiosity, the perpetual modelling of what is not yet present, is the same that makes contentment structurally difficult. We are, as the evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright has mentioned, wired for a ‘hedonic treadmill’, each attainment recalibrates the baseline upward, so that the same brain that celebrated the achievement immediately begins scanning for the next deficiency. Neurologically, there is no end to our search for happiness. Sadly, we humans are not biologically designed for contentment.

But, maybe we can micro-dose on contentment to get past ‘what’s the point of all this?’

I might not be designed for contentment, but maybe I can use it to quell my restless brain when it hits that familiar wall.

If we read between the lines of our best recorded knowledge on contentment, it’s not that we require the suppression of our humanness to access it. I think the realistic human approach to contentment is to revisit it as a recalibrating mindframe. When our striving gets overwhelming, remembering ‘sufficiency’ would help for a little while; do what must be done, and know when it is done. We don’t have to silence the human animal or pretend to become monastic beings while daytiming as working people. We can build capacity for accurate self-assessment and know the difference between genuine need and the brain’s ambient restlessness. Do we need to buy all that toilet paper just because the war is escalating? We know the better answer to that.

At one end, the squirrel that triggered this exploration into contentment is only content because its nervous system is beautifully calibrated to the present: hunger, satiation, warmth, threat and procreation. It cannot anticipate next year’s drought or worry about whether it has done enough with its life. Its contentment is real, but it is the contentment of a closed system. At the other end of the spectrum, if such a thing can be imagined, is a consciousness so complete, so fully knowing, that it would have no gap between what is and what it understands. No uncertainty to generate anxiety. No future to dread. Contentment from absolute knowing, as opposed to contentment from minimal knowing.

The human condition sits somewhere in the uncomfortable middle and has always known it. We know too much to rest like the squirrel and too little to rest like a god. We can anticipate loss without being able to prevent it. We can imagine a better version of our lives with enough vividness to make the present feel insufficient. This is not a design flaw exactly. It is what produced art, medicine, mathematics, and the question of whether a squirrel is more evolved than its observer. But it also produced the churning of the never-ending ins and outs of commerce, the lined-up tasks, the perpetual forward lean we have.

Maybe, then, it’s not to envy the squirrel. It’s how to borrow, briefly and deliberately, what the squirrel has without surrendering who we are. Not contentment as a destination, but contentment as a practice; the conscious, occasional act of closing the loop and returning to what is currently complete in our lives. Maybe all the human traditions and philosophies named contentment so carefully and deliberately because it isn’t automatic for us. Because contentment has to be chosen by us.

So, I sit in brief contentment over tea and watch mango leaves in the breeze, before I go back to my tasks. I leave the sleeping squirrel on the branch, hoping it wouldn’t get eaten by my cat, scheming from the balcony; because contentment wouldn’t save it.

Part 1: You don't need a logo to start a business.

Why designing an identity before establishing meaning is…well…a waste of money

Contrary to popular assumption, most governments do not require a logo or letterhead to register a business. It’s not a legal requirement. A letterhead is a signifier of legitimacy and administrative readiness. It’s functional; designed to certify, not just circulate. Sometimes it requires one as part of the registration process. But a logo? Almost never.

And yet, it’s usually the first thing people ask me for.

Commercial stories evolve. They change shape. Look at Canon, from its first mark to what it is today. In 1933, the camera was called ‘Kwanon’; after the Buddhist deity of compassion. When they decided to go global, they dropped the goddess and registered the name ‘Canon.’ The meaning came first. The simplified logo came after the reputation was already understood.

Why do you think Canon simplified their mark… because they ran out of ideas?

I find that more logos get simplified because they have outgrown the need to explain themselves. The logo followed the business, not the other way around.

So when clients come to me at the early stages of launching, I usually recommend they don’t invest in a logo just yet. Better to invest in writing, photography, and above all, product development. A logo matters, but not for the reasons most people think, and rarely as early as they think it does.

Think of it as the lifespan of a reputation.

At some point in time, somewhere between the Louis Vuitton handbags and Nike caps, the logo became merchandise. And the meaning became equity. Now, a logo is only worth something once it’s earned a reputation or manufactured. More on that later…

It begins with the way you conduct business. The way it offers a solution, shows up, or maybe even simply listens to consumers. These gestures become the business story. And it evolves through repetition and trust. It becomes a reputation. And eventually, it crystallizes into form.

That’s when you invest in a logo… A good one, with all the bells and whistles.

Reputations are manufactured or grown.

Sometimes the entrepreneurs who hire us don’t have the luxury of time. They can’t grow a reputation organically; they need to inform and distribute within a short window. They need to manufacture one.

$6.9 billion reputation…

The Olympics spends hundreds of millions on branding every four years; an entirely new visual identity each cycle, built from scratch, designed to tell a story, about a city, a culture, a moment, etc.

Does it work? Does anyone ever buy a ticket for the logo alone?

Sometimes all you need to do is show up consistently.

Soorya Matchboxes, producing Sri Lanka’s first wax-coated safety matches since 1984; do they need to manufacture a new reputation each time?

Both approaches work. But only one of them requires a logo on day one. And they follow different timelines and different logics.

• A manufactured reputation, like the Olympics, a product launch, a rebrand, these are commissions. There is a clear brief, focused scope, and the goal post can’t move. High effort, high cost, concentrated into a short window. You get something finished. Something you can point to.

  
  

• A lived reputation, like Soorya didn’t commission their brand equity; they accumulated it. And the businesses that grow that way don’t usually need a single expensive solution. They need ongoing support.

  
  

That’s the model we’ve built our story studio membership around. We learn about our members, offering to help them package and distribute their stories consistently over time. Lower cost, higher value in the long run. In the end, they get a very good logo and everything else along the way.

They are mnemonic

Here’s a simple example: On your way home from work, you remember to buy some tea. You take it home, drink it. Turns out to be the best tea you’ve ever had. A few days later, you run out, go back to the shop and ask for the same one. The shopkeeper points to the shelf and says, ‘Over there, the box that says Zesta.’

Now you are a Zesta Tea person.

The logo didn’t create any experience. It just gave you a way back to it. That’s what a mnemonic does, it doesn’t build the memory, it retrieves one that already exists. The real value is in the association the mark holds. The logo doesn’t create that relationship. It inherits it.

A mnemonic only works when there’s already something to remember.

JK Keller took a self-portrait every single day for 25 years, from age 22 to 47. At a glance, it’s an archive; Then think about the relationship between himself, his practice, and an audience that watched him become something over time. That’s where the real value lives. It’s not in the mark itself, but in the accumulated trust it signifies. The logo doesn’t create that relationship. It inherits it.

Part 2 up next…

This text is an interpretation of a 2026 seminar on the lifespan of commercial stories, delivered for the Academy of Design, Sri Lanka. The seminar was designed to help understand how meaning is seeded, scaled, and sustained. It encourages design for continuity, not just aesthetics; for symbols that circulate, not just certify. So if you’re building something, start with consistency: consistency in product or service, or in story. Show up and let the reputation accumulate until the symbol has something worth inheriting.