The Founding Story of brown girl surf's Logo

I began by writing the story of how I got inspired to surf, despite growing up in a culture where surfing was far from the norm. I expressed a desire to connect with other brown girl surfers like myself. Over a period of months, I began to share the story with friends and family for feedback. I then conceptualized it into a visual collage made up of images and art from my travels and connections around the world.

I shared the collage with fellow artist Wen Fei Hsu, who collaborated with me to render the concept into a visual mark. Wen Fei was one of the first graduates of the nonprofit women’s entrepreneurship training program I started and ran for 12 years prior to founding brown girl surf. So it was really meaningful for me to work with her on this concept.

After months of iterations, it finally came together. The most defining feature of the mark was the zebra fin, inspired by the bottom of a surfboard I had shaped while traveling in Indonesia. The pattern was a (supposed) defense against sharks of the Indo-Pacific. First we thought it would be cool to make a wave out of the zebra print, but then people said it looked too much like a shark fin, and that wasn’t quite the spirit we were going for. So, we brought the zebra to the fin!

We dropped our first t-shirt line with the mark in 2011 in the spirit of honoring misfits and trailblazers of the water world. We love our mark and we hope you do too!

- Farhana Huq
Founder, brown girl surf