Oddish

Yogyakarta has always attracted a certain kind of founder. People who move thoughtfully, who care about the experience they are building, and who have enough distance from the Jakarta pace to actually think through what they are making before they open the doors. Oddish Family Hub fits that description precisely.

Oddish is an outdoor playground concept built around developing sensory and motor skills in children, operating from Jl. Umbul Permai in Sariharjo, Ngaglik, Sleman. The scope of what it offers goes well beyond a standard playground. Alongside the outdoor play area, there are structured kids activity classes with coaches, a partnership with All Rich Resto so parents can eat while their children play, and weekly themed workshops for the Kids Club program. There is also a co-working space for parents who need to stay productive while their children are occupied. The concept covers the full family visit in a way that very few kids destinations in Yogyakarta have thought through as completely.

Oddish began operations in January 2023 and has grown into one of Sleman's most visible family destinations. The Instagram account now sits at 28,000 followers, and the brand has since extended into catering and private events. For a playground that started from three couples with young children and a shared ambition, the growth has been real and steady.

Oddish had no brand identity when the project started. Three couples, a strong concept, a location, and a name. The name itself was the starting point for everything.

Oddish is built from the names of the founders' children combined, and it carries the word "odd" inside it. That embedded quality was not incidental. The founders wanted a brand that embraced being odd, meaning uncommon, not quite like anything else, worth a second look. In the Yogyakarta kids activity market, where most competitors lean into safe palettes of primary colors and familiar character types, a commitment to being genuinely odd was a real creative brief.

The challenge with designing for children's brands is well understood: the work needs to be energetic and eye-catching without becoming chaotic, distinctive without being illegible, and playful without being condescending to the parents who are making the actual purchasing decision. Getting that balance right requires more discipline than most children's design projects receive. The instinct to throw bright colors at everything and call it done is a trap. The identity needed to be uncommon in the same way the brand claimed to be.

The founding story also needed to live somewhere inside the identity. Six people built Oddish together: three married couples who shared a vision for what a children's play destination in Yogyakarta could be. The human origin of the brand was part of what made it meaningful, and it deserved to be embedded in the visual language rather than left as a backstory in a press release.

Arterie built the complete brand identity for Oddish, with a character and illustration system at the center.

The logomark and visual language are deliberately abstract. Shapes that do not resolve immediately into familiar forms reward a longer look, which is the visual equivalent of the brand's commitment to being uncommon. The abstraction is not arbitrary. Each element in the identity system has a grounding in the physical world of children's play, drawn from the specific objects and structures of the playground itself: the seesaw, the roundabout, the climbing frame, the swing. These become the source material for characters and graphic elements that feel original rather than borrowed from the standard vocabulary of kids branding.

The character system gives the brand its warmth and animation. Rather than a single mascot, the identity uses a family of characters that can appear across different contexts, giving Oddish visual range without fragmentation. The characters work at the scale of a signage panel, a social media post, a paper cup, or a birthday party backdrop. They feel like they belong to a world that Oddish invented, because they do.

The founding story shows up in the structure of the system rather than in any single element. Six founders, three couples, two perspectives always in dialogue, children at the center of every decision. The identity reflects that layered origin without announcing it.

A complete brand identity for one of Yogyakarta's most considered kids outdoor playground concepts, built around abstract characters and forms inspired by the physical language of play. The brand now carries that identity across 821 Instagram posts and counting, across its Kids Club programming, its catering operation, and every touchpoint where Oddish shows up for the families who have made it part of their regular life in Sleman.

For founders building kids venues, family destinations, or children's entertainment brands in Indonesia, this project shows what brand identity design looks like when the brief is taken seriously enough to produce something that earns the word it is built on.