Identity and website for Architecture Doing Place, an architecture and urban design studio from London. This project is an exercise of strengthening and synthesizing the previous identity of A.Do.P.

The logotype is conceived as an architectural element that vertebrates the identity. Its flexibility allows to adapt it to different supports. It is a system itself that mutates depending on the application, thus generating different layout.

With the aim of reinforcing the values of the studio and its cultural background, the selected color-scheme is based on African imaginary. The result is a more approachable and playful attitude.

The main element of this project is the website. The logotype was therefore designed to work primarily on the digital medium, reinforcing its functionality as an element of interaction and organization of the content.

Design by Carles Rodrigo. Web development by Àlex Garcés.

Graphic identity for Creixem al Carme, a cultural initiative born with the aim of strengthening the relationships between the cultural-educational environments and their neighbors in El Carme, the original urban nucleus of the city of Valencia. 73% of the city's cultural activity is concentrated in this neighborhood. Its surroundings are made up of vestiges and layers of history that are still preserved in the layout of its streets.

The aim was to create a dynamic and attractive graphic identity that would value the three premises of the project: ‘the basic is extraordinary’, ‘art as a learning tool’ and ‘the environment constructed with layers of history’.

The brand identity is built from a wide range of bright colors that combine to generate different layers to solve all communication needs of the project. La Nord, a sans serif typeface with gestural details in its characters, gives clarity and proximity to the identity.

For the visual system, the basic geometric shapes (square, circle and rectangle) allude to the learnings of art. These shapes are playing, moving and deforming to provide, along with the range of color and typography, endless visual solutions.

Terremoto is a one-year project, featuring 365 days of photojournalism coverage on the earthquake in Italy in 2016. A multimedia project commissioned by Donna Moderna magazine, it spans an online long-form, a short movie, and a huge unbound photobook. Photo reportage by Alessandro Scotti. The wall project was designed by TOMO TOMO (Luca Pitoni, Davide Di Gennaro, Pietro Buffa, Giacomo Traldi). The big size of the book (30×40cm) stands for the vastness of the devastation caused by the earthquake. The unbound finishing symbolizes the uncertainty of the future. Book photo by Louis De Belle.

Poster design for the 2016 edition of music festival Nox Orae.
Designed by Ultra Studio, Vevey.

Euclid Flex typeface is available from Swiss Typefaces.

Web adaptation by Simon Pinkas

Studio La Direction (Elsa Audouin and Aurelien Arnaud) designed the poster and scenography of the second edition of Start Festival with the typeface Maax, created by Damien Gautier.

Canise was inspired by a popular joke about an encounter between a large naval ship and a lighthouse. The layout of this edition is adapted to its content. Many white pages have been inserted in moments of wait. In strong moments, the comments are illustrated with images. The reader lives through the story as if it was told by a radio presenter, recreating the tones and pauses.

A campaign for Skiddle featuring real customers. Skiddle is a ticket outlet and events guide based in Preston dealing with event bookings, registrations, promotion and online ticket sales.

Art Direction: David Sedgwick, Studio DBD

Photography & Retouching: Ilka & Franz​
Wardrobe Styling: Zoe Kozlik
Styling Assistant: Stephanie Sofokleous
Make-up & Hair: Babs Forman​

End of year design graduates exhibition from l’Université du Québec à Montréal. This special edition brought together all academic programs of the school of design for the first time ever. Wigrum Regular, from FEEDTYPE, is the foundation for this flexible identity, designed to develop on top of an unstable and ever-changing situation caused by a student strike.

Bernaskoni:

From the 28th May to 27th November 2016, the XV Architectural Biennale [was] held in Venice, the main global event in the world of architecture and urbanistics. […] On the invitation of Alejandro Aravena, the BERNASKONI bureau [presented] the MATREX installation as part of the main exhibition project of the Biennale.

The book is an integral part of the Matrex exhibition project. The volume consists of three parts, dedicated to the Matryoshka, the Matrex building and the Pyramid. In tracing the unconventional cultural histories of the Matryoshka and the Pyramid — in terms of shapes, principles, hierarchies, etc. — the book discovers their various interconnections. The book resembles a series of “postcards”, presenting various kinds of anecdotes, which can be taken independently or combined to form diverse narratives. The aim of these stories is to support the core part of the book, covering the concept, architecture and programme of the Matrex building. The first edition of the book presented at the exhibition, constituting a peculiar prototype of a future publication, which will be released on the completion of construction of the Matrex.

Rebranding of the multidisciplinary design agency GSM Project. A brand built on a changing color palette and Guillon, a custom typeface from the FEEDTYPE foundry inspired by montreality and the Swiss international style.

Guillon is named in honour of designer Jacques Guillon. After designing the Cord Chair (1953), Mr. Guillon lent his initial to GSM Project, the multidisciplinary design agency he started with Morley Smith and Laurent Marquart. Right from the beginning, GSM has breathed a modernist, international life into Montreality, with notable contributions to Expo 67, the design of the Montreal Metro, and the furnishings of the head office of Alcan aluminium corporation.

Visual identity designed for the contemporary music company We spoke which takes residence at the Café-Théâtre Le Bourg in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Designer: aboutblank.ch

The Euclid Flex font family is available from Swiss Typefaces.

The new identity for Queensland Theatre strives to connect with new and old audiences through simplicity, brand recognition and the use of relevant facts, opinions and the translation of theatre speak to something more accessible.

A new wordmark / display typeface was made — the letterforms drawing inspiration from surrounding historical signage, the brightness and contrast of the Queensland Sun, and the long angular shadows that it creates. This results in letterforms with a dimensional physicality.

Used in a compositional structure of masthead and base block, powerful imagery, playful typographic expressions and provocative/engaging language live in-between. Theatre is communication. Ideas presented and considered and dissected. It’s an open conversation. With a new found dialogue that pervades every interaction and experience with the theatre, Queensland aims to bring that back.

Going Down Swinging:

The latest edition of Going Down Swinging brings you the fierce talent of forty incredible writers.

Up-and-coming or proven, they’ll sweep you into the studios of Kurdish artists, lose you in the sprawling subway of Mexico City and have you squinting through the ochre dust-haze of Australia’s red centre. Brace for big losses, broken nostalgia, weird romances and clear-eyed discovery.

Sabre’s ‘graphic, rather than typographic’ design takes reference from stone-carved lettering, also the idea of letters constructed from a set of component shapes, connected at a sharp point. It is used here at headline and text size, mixed with various serif and sans serif types.

Studio MPLS:

Tenth Muse is a start-up perfume brand that creates custom, personalized botanical fragrances from the world's finest sustainably-sourced natural ingredients. We were tasked with developing a visual brand language and range of application extensions for Tenth Muse that combine clarity and beauty with intrigue and mystery, key characteristics found at the core of their creative process.

The True Honey Company (TTHC) dedicates itself to the production of mānuka honey, a monofloral variety produced in Australia and New Zealand from the nectar of the mānuka tree. It has a unique colour and texture, and a high level of Dietary Methyglyoxal, an organic compound with antibacterial and antiviral properties.

With a price range starting at 60.00AUD and rising to 230.00AUD per jar, and working in a market flooded with sub-standard honey and dishonest marketing, communicating the value of product and the commitment of TTHC to quality and ethical production through an impactful and engaging brand identity and packaging design was paramount. This task was given to Auckland-based graphic design studio and packaging specialists Marx Design who collaborated with Think Packaging and writer Kate Phillips.

Read more about this project on BP&O.

Source: www.pentagram.com © Mastercard. License: All Rights Reserved.

It isn’t adored by quite as many young fans as other riders of the current geo-sans wave — typefaces like GT Walsheim, LL Brown, and LL Circular — but FF Mark is one of the more popular releases of the last three years, and it’s picking up steam. You see it in industries from tech to editorial, in print and on the web. As a plain, clear sans with a moderate x-height it works reasonably well in most of these environments, yet it’s often called to do jobs it’s not really meant to do: especially pages full of light body copy where the design’s uniform stroke and letter widths paint a pretty drab monotone.

Source: www.pentagram.com © Mastercard. License: All Rights Reserved.

That’s not a period, it’s a ®. Trademark symbols have become like terms and conditions texts: legally required, but practically useless. Designers prefer to make them as small as possible to get them out of the way of their logo.

Source: www.pentagram.com © Mastercard. License: All Rights Reserved.

Designed by Hannes von Döhren and Christoph Koeberlin in 2013, FF Mark filled a gap in FontFont’s library: a geometric sans with a large lowercase. This sample image is by Pentagram, who is admirably steadfast in crediting the type they use.

This major redesign for Mastercard, however, is exactly the kind of mission FF Mark was trained for. Pentagram began by refocusing on the iconic interlocking symbol, now nearly 50 years old, wisely clearing it of its clutter and moving the name to the side or below. The new circular typeface obviously echoes the symbol’s geometry, but it’s not just about circles: FF Mark’s other characteristics fit well too — its broad stance, open forms (‘s’ and ‘c’), the roundness of the ‘m’ arches and ‘t’ tail.

Source: www.pentagram.com © Mastercard. License: All Rights Reserved.

This redesign is not so much a revolution for Mastercard as a callback to the best logo of the brand’s past. In 1979, “MasterCard” was set in ITC Avant Garde Gothic, stamped boldly over the center of the circles. This was replaced in 1990 by an ill-advised italic which was later littered with a drop shadow in typical ’90s fashion. Going back to a geometric sans serif is a no-brainer, but Avant Garde is rather cold and closed. Switching to all-lowercase FF Mark refreshes the banal corporate presentation with a more approachable air.

Source: www.pentagram.com © Mastercard. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.pentagram.com © Mastercard. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.pentagram.com © Mastercard. License: All Rights Reserved.

As we can expect from an experienced firm like Pentagram, the logo and type harmonize naturally. The designers resist the urge to rationalize the geometry via some contrived construction grid. And all the work is thoughtfullly implemented in a variety of environments where bite-size chunks of type combine with large images and the overlapping circle motif.

Source: www.pentagram.com © Mastercard. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.pentagram.com © Mastercard. License: All Rights Reserved.

These teaser images for the new identity came out pretty nicely. It’s solid work. Not thrilling, but as fresh a look as you can expect from a multinational payment network. The question remains, however: Will FF Mark be the only part of the typographic palette for this new identity? Will it be used to set long passages of text? Will it be pushed beyond its purpose? We’ll have to wait for the answer because the redesign was just announced today. (Mastercard.com is still set in Accord Alternate, a 2010 face that already feels dated, perhaps because it piggybacks on the well-worn spurless concept from 20 years ago.)

Source: www.youtube.com © Mastercard. License: All Rights Reserved.

This mockup (not necessarily a final design) overlooks a basic principle of setting body text: the more space letters have inside them, the more space they need between them.

I hope this teaser video is not an indication of FF Mark’s intended role, because some of these screens make all the most common geo-sans mistakes: a light weight, spaced way too tightly, for all the text on the page. A financial services company striving for clarity and simplicity should take the readability of mundane info as seriously as its logo.

Source: www.pentagram.com © Mastercard. License: All Rights Reserved.

At its core, this is a strong mark, returning Mastercard to its former glory, by emphasizing not the name, but the symbol: a couple of unmistakable dots that shine your way to a shop door, even from across the street.

Designers Portugueses is a collection of 13 books devoted to Portuguese designers. It is distributed with the newspaper Público.

Fifth issue of Die Epilog, a German magazine that deals with the change of our society. By looking into the small things that are changing in our everday lives, it wants to explore and welcome the bigger shift around us.

Coinciding with the renovation of their building in downtown San Francisco, the SFMOMA redesigned their logo and identity using a modified FF Mark, and an entirely new custom version specifically for text use drawn by FF Mark’s codesigner Christoph Koeberlin.

Credits:

Jennifer Sonderby, Design Director, leads the SFMOMA Design Studio, whose team includes Bosco Hernandez, art director; James Provenza, senior designer; the designers Sophine Lim, Amy Yu Gray, and Mathieu Stemmelen; and project coordinator Carrie Taffel.

“To create SFMOMA Text, Koeberlin increased the [x-height]. By elongating the letters and eliminating their perfectly rounded circles, some of the pronounced distractions were removed. A double-story ‘a’ was introduced to provide a distinctive letterform that wouldn’t be confused with ‘o’ or ‘c’ and would allow for faster ingestion of text.”

“The letters in our logo served as the inspiration for SFMOMA Display, which adopts their open shapes and gracious curves. SFMOMA Display is distinguished by the splayed legs of its ‘M’, the lower counter of the ‘A’, and the sinuous curves of the capital ‘S’. And be sure not to miss the sleekly modern ‘Q’!”

Continuing our work with A3 Sports we have launched DRoP!, a speciality multi-brand sneaker store. Designed to appeal to sneakerheads, we created a sophisticated sportswear retail brand rooted in sneaker and urban culture.

The name and logo were inspired by sneaker drop dates which are essential to any sneaker collector coveting the first release of streetwear products. The use of this term fits perfectly with DRoP!’s mission to deliver the freshest product to hungry sneakerheads.

Our store concept avoids prevailing trends in sneaker retail and uses spatial design to immerse and tantalise the consumer.