A Bear Bearing a Barrel of Beer

At this very moment we’re working on an identity project for a local brewery. In this post we’re sharing some work in progress we find kind of cute: a bear with a beer barrel.

Almost Street Art

Recycling is not only valid when it comes to paper and old cans – it’s an invaluable concept in design. A year ago or so we started a poster for a street theater festival but never finished it. And last month we found a perfect place to reuse it (with all the proper changes, of course) when the International Street Artists’ Festival „Ulicznicy” (which translates sort of like Street Urchins, I guess, but sounds better) decided to announce a competition for this year’s poster.

Now, we have all sorts of qualms about design competitions but it would be a waste not to use an almost ready design so we did. And then when you win it’s not very becoming to go on about those qualms and yes, we did win with the poster below.

We like collages but for such a versatile tool there are surprisingly few occasions to use them so we’re glad we could this time. The poster is based on an actual photography of the feathered guy on a red thread edited later and completed with vector elements, like the buildings-letters and typography. Broadening our comfort zone a little, we went for a retro-hippy-extravagant look and hey, it worked.

The poster in it’s entirety.

Typographic close-up.

National Museum of Coincidence

More often than not, we unfortunately don’t win in competitions and today’s post is about our unpicked design. Once upon a time the National Museum in Warsaw announced a contest for a much-needed redesign of its branding. Below you can see the winning entry, a work by a Warsaw studio, which is a decisive improvement over the previous inconsistent branding of the Museum. The whole logo is based on a ligature-related concept of creating a mark based on the Museum’s monogram MNW.

We quite like this logo, particularly the slash between the mark and the logotype, maybe less so the serif letter of the logotype. But what really surprised us was how close the idea was to ours, which you can see below.

We know it’s the internet, the land of accusation, so we want to make one thing abundantly clear: we’re sure there’s no relation between our design and the winning one, other than a similar idea that popped into several heads at once (and for all we know there might have been a dozen other entries based on the same thing). We’re also not showing this to bitch that we didn’t win and someone with a similar concept did. We simply wanted to show our design and it’d be hard to ignore this coincidence when talking about it.

We also based our concept on a ligature built from M, N and W but made it less radical – all the letters are present – and made it resemble a winding ribbon.

 

Business card and letterhead, both with red reverse.

Gift bags, to use in the kiosk with souvenirs.

Books FTW

Superheroic icons are plenty of fun but sometimes we actually do serious work too. This is our recent logo for the Library of the Warsaw University of Technology, which won the main prize in a competition.

The logo, modular, in basic colors, plays with the simplified image of books on a shelf. It’s paired with condensed DIN, to create a technical image, fitting for the institution dealing with technology.

Bookmark.

Cover of a notebook.

Pen.

Tote bag.

Coffee cup.

Embossed version of the logo.

T-shirt.

Library signage to denote sections of the library (here: Optics).