the original ideas for aspects of hindu, shinto, and buddhist beliefs

i initially put together these sketch ideas for simple, one-color hand drawn symbols, before combining them with images:

…and this attempt at logos for the various belief systems, heavily abstracted to the point where you may not even guess their meaning at first glance, or second. It mimics hundreds of years of abstraction of a pictogram, such as the evolution of Chinese symbology for words.

The goal was to minimize the illustrative elements.

The combination produced this grid of concepts for new symbols by methodically blending two of each for each religion.

combinations
A: abstract symbol P: photo H: handrawn image

From there, we picked our favorite three, and vectorized them.

the new three symbols: Shinto, Hinduism, Buddhism. Heavily abstracted, in logo form.

I liked the symbols, but they needed to be more fully explored, so each was done in 30 iterations, making a total of 90 new experimental symbols.