DIANDRA JOHNSON
ABOUT
PROJECTS:
PURSEN
NURA CANDLES
PURSEN LITTBAG
EXTREMESNEAKLIST
PURSEN X BLUEGRAYGAL
THINK SHADES OF PINK
HONEY SILK
IRIE TEA
ORANGE KICKERS CLUB
DIANDRA JOHNSON
ABOUT
PROJECTS:
PURSEN
NURA CANDLES
PURSEN LITTBAG
EXTREMESNEAKLIST
PURSEN X BLUEGRAYGAL
THINK SHADES OF PINK
HONEY SILK
IRIE TEA
ORANGE KICKERS CLUB
THE BRIEF
Design a conceptual organic candle brand that feels genuinely premium without losing its connection to nature.
The challenge was balancing refinement with rawness, creating something that felt elevated but not cold, luxurious but not artificial.
BRAND DIRECTION
Naming a brand starts with understanding what the product actually does, not just functionally, but emotionally. Candles give off scent, but they also give off light. And the light from a candle does something specific — it creates calm. As a sole light source in a room, it shifts the atmosphere entirely. That feeling of ease became the anchor for the brand.
From there, I researched words and names connected to light across different languages and origins. That search led me to Nura. A name of Arabic origin meaning light, illumination, and radiance. It was the right fit. It’s one syllable, feminine, and inherently calming. The name doesn't announce itself. It settles.
The brand tagline, Illuminate Nature's Elegance, grew naturally from that foundation tying the emotional quality of candlelight back to the natural world each scent lives in.
VISUAL IDENTITY
The typographic system pairs a bold, high-contrast serif wordmark with refined secondary type, creating tension between strength and softness that mirrors the brand itself.
The packaging is minimal by design, letting the nature imagery carry the emotional context for each scent.
Each scent was given its own color world, drawn directly from the environment it references:
Coastal Cove — notes of gardenia, citrus, and ginger. The palette pulls from the soft blues and whites of open water. The scent is fresh and light, so the visual direction followed that same feeling — airy, open, and tropical without being loud.
Into the Woods — deep musk, earthy tones, warm spice. A deep forest green palette with imagery of moss and dense woodland. The goal was something that felt grounded and unhurried, matching the weight and warmth of the scent.
Black Sands — notes of vanilla, jasmine, and apricot. Inspired by the black sand beaches of Hawaii, the cream packaging creates contrast against the dark volcanic sand imagery. The softness of the scent needed something tactile and unexpected to balance it.
The intention across all three was consistent. The packaging is gives viewer a clear sense of the environment before the candle is ever lit. The imagery isn't decorative, it's directional.
PACKAGING SYSTEM
Each of the three scents shares the same structural packaging design, but carries its own color palette and imagery, making them feel cohesive without being identical. When designing the dieline, I thought about every panel intentionally. What lives on the front, how the side copy reads at shelf, where the barcode sits on the bottom.
The brand insert was something I wanted to include because the experience shouldn't stop at the shelf. Once someone brings Nura home, opens the box, and finds something thoughtful inside, that's another way the brand earns the relationship.
BRAND TOUCHPOINTS
To push the concept beyond packaging, I extended Nura into out-of-home advertising, exploring how the brand would show up at scale. The billboard execution for Into the Woods placed the candle inside its own landscape, immersed in the environment its scent evokes. My thought process was, if this brand lived in the real world, where would
it show up and how would it feel?
REFLECTION
What I took away most from this project was how much the concept does before the design even starts. Once I had the name, the meaning behind it, and the idea of nature as the entry point, the visual decisions felt less like choices and more like conclusions. Everything else followed.
If I were to keep developing Nura, I'd want to explore how the brand lives digitally. What does the world of each scent look like on a website or in a social space? I'd also push the vessel label and product shape further, thinking about how the candle itself feels in someone's hands before the box is even opened.