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ChickieNobs don’t require a stretch of the imagination. Anyone who has ever eaten a Chicken McNugget from McDonald’s can probably relate. As for what they are exactly, I’ll let this passage from Oryx and Crake explain:

"This is the latest," said Crake. What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing. "What the hell is it?" said Jimmy. "Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit. "But there aren’t any heads…" "That’s the head in the middle," said the woman. "There’s a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don’t need those." "This is horrible," said Jimmy. The thing was a nightmare. It was like an animal-protein tuber.

There’s a challenge in designing a logo for something so obviously horrifying, but it’s the kind of real world challenge that companies like KFC face whenever they introduce something as disgusting as The Double Down Dog to consumers. I looked at brands like KFC, Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s when doing research for this logo. Those companies are the masters at taking disgusting processed food products and presenting them in a friendly way. It was difficult to straddle the line between the satirical nature of ChickieNobs while still treating it as a product that could actually exist.

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From The Year of the Flood:

"The secret of SecretBurgers was that no one knew what sort of animal protein was actually in them: the counter girls wore T-shirts and baseball caps with the slogan Secret Burgers! Because Everyone Loves a Secret! … The meat grinders weren’t 100 per cent efficient; you might find a swatch of cat fur in your burger or a fragment of mouse tail. Was there a human fingernail, once?"

Eating any fast food hamburger is essentially taking your life into your own hands. For meat eaters it can be easy to disassociate the lump of protein you’re putting into your mouth with the actual animal that became your meal. The concept of SecretBurgers takes this to the next level.   It has long been rumored that McDonald’s, the world’s leading purveyor of beef, has been padding out its meat product with soy additives. While this has been proven to be untrue, there is still distrust. Fast food customers tend to fall into a collective delusion that what we’re eating is 100% beef. Beef additives aren’t far fetched. Anyone who has ever snapped into a Slim Jim is consuming mechanically separated chicken, wheat, soy and corn. So who cares if a little rat protein ends up in the mix, right? This logo was a challenge mainly because it adds a feminine flair to what is generally considered a masculine product. The texture of the letterforms in “Burgers” has a rough texture, meant to evoke ground beef and be masculine friendly.  I used the S in Secret as a wisp of smoke coming off the burger. The S also alludes to a question mark without being too overt about it. Wink wink.

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Scales and Tails is a franchised sex club that becomes an important location in The Year of the Flood. Ren, one of the story’s main characters is employed as a dancer there. The club features a snake and bird motif, as performers don skintight BioFilm bodysuits that feature scales and feathers. I pictured it as sort of an adult version of Rainforest Cafe, offering patrons an exotic sex adventure.   Atwood describes the snake in the logo as winking. The only real visual description of the brand comes in the form of a pin that Zeb wears while working security at Scales. The pin is an Ouroboros, the mythological snake that devours its own tail. It represents a perpetual cycle of rebirth, which is a central theme of the trilogy. While I chose not to have the python literally eatings its own tail, I did use the circular motif as the basis for the logo. I couldn’t resist throwing in an apple to represent temptation, although this element is not mentioned in the novel. The symbology of the serpent seemed like an obvious nod to Christianity. 

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Atwood describes AnooYoo like this:

"…a beauty-and-mood-enhancing Corp, which was a dubious affiliate of HealthWyzer. Health and Beauty, the two seductive twins joined at the navel, singing their eternal siren songs. A lot of people would pay through their nose jobs for either one."

Zeb sums up the difference between AnooYoo and HelthWyzer thusly:

"If it hurts and you feel sick and it’s making you ugly, take this, from HelthWyzer; if you’re ugly and it hurts and you feel sick about it, take that, from AnooYoo."

One of the AnooYoo branches becomes a central location of the story. Toby lives and works in the AnooYoo compound and then takes up residence there after the Great Flood. Reference is made to the pink clothes at the AnooYoo spa multiple times and Toby acknowledges that bright pink is not the most effective survival gear. Aside from the color pink, the logo is described as having a winking eye and kissy lips. I had some trouble representing winking eye and elected to leave it off altogether to give the logo an air of intrigue and mystery. The descriptions make it sound like a very feminine brand, but it is clear from the story that both men and women pay for AnooYoo’s services.

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Happicuppa is Maddaddam’s version of Starbucks. It is also meant to echo our world’s Monsanto, a controversial biotechnology corporation know for gene modification of produce.

'Until then the individual coffee beans on each bush had ripened at different times and had needed to be hand picked and processed and shipped in small quantities, but the Happicuppa coffee bush was designed so that all of its beans would ripen simultaneously, and coffee could be grown on huge plantations and harvested with machines.This threw the small growers out of business and reduced both them and their labourers to starvation-level poverty.'

Protests against Happicuppa and the practice of gene modification grown into a “global resistance movement.” One only has to imagine the symbolic trashing of Starbucks windows by anarchists in the early 2000s to understand the reference. The design for this one seemed pretty obvious to me: a happy cappuccino cup. Does your brand have an image problem? Just put a smiley face on it.

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HelthWyzer is essentially the monolithic antagonist of the trilogy and is at the center of the plague that wipes out humanity. HelthWyzer is one of the largest of the Corps and has its fingers in many other businesses. AnooYoo is one of the many subsidiaries of HelthWyzer. One of HelthWyzer’s nefarious schemes is to implant diseases in medication and then sell the patients the cure for the disease they contracted through the HelthWyzer medications.

"The best diseases, from a business point of view,” said Crake, “would be those that cause lingering illness. Ideally – that is, for maximum profit – the patient should either get well or die just before all of his or her money runs out. It’s a fine calculation."

HelthWyzer is an encapsulation of our fear of big pharmaceutical companies. We know these companies don’t exist for the betterment of humanity; they exist to make a profit.In designing the HelthWyzer logo, I decided to go for something that emphasizes how innocuous they would want to appear. The rounded shapes evoke a variety of harmless symbols: pills, cells, tongue depressors, stitches, even a strand of DNA. I chose four shades of blue to represent the four nucleotides that make up DNA: GATC. These shades of blue also evoke something very clinical. I even took care to choose round letterforms to accentuate how harmless the company purports to be.