Elegance, extravagance, and Nordic design heritage: Studio C unpacks its brand for Audo Copenhagen

Audo Copenhagen, launched in June 2023, is a Danish design powerhouse and furniture atelier born from the merger of MENU and By Lassen with The Audo. Rooted in a century of Nordic design history, they blend timeless aesthetics with modern international perspectives and a deep-rooted commitment to creative collaboration. To aid in the branding process, they approached Copenhagen-based practice Studio C, who crafted a single, unified voice and visual identity for the new chapter of their business – one that honours the company’s history and recounts the brand’s unique story.

The creative direction was a collaborative effort, spearheaded by Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen of Norm Architects and Christian Møller Andersen from Kinfolk Magazine, working closely with Audo’s in-house team and Studio C. As Studio C’s Alicia Mundy, who was Lead Designer on the project, explains, “Audo and its predecessor MENU, as well as their good friends Norm Architects, have been responsible for popularising the Nordic and Japanese inspired ‘quiet minimal’ aesthetic that has won them many fans worldwide. The foundational design principles of this aesthetic are an appreciation of quality, tactility and timelessness. Our work had to respect this much-loved aesthetic approach but also allow the new brand to push the envelope beyond what has been expected of them so far.”

The team kicked off with a series of design workshops, exploring various type styles, layout principles, and motion techniques in relation to Audo’s new imagery and quickly aligned on a type-led visual language, featuring a playful, oversized condensed serif logotype as the star of the show, balanced by more subdued typography elsewhere. Drawing inspiration from 19th and 20th-century book typography, particularly title pages and colophons, the visual identity strikes a balance between extravagance and elegance – an approach that, according to Mundy, aligns perfectly with Audo’s soft yet discerning aesthetic.

“The wordmark is set in Romana,” Mundy explains, “originally designed by Riegerl & Wießenborn, a German type foundry that existed in the early 1900s. When you have a word like ‘Audo’ that is so short and visually simple, each letterform has to work quite hard. It was originally cut for text sizes, giving it a welcoming softness when used at a large scale, particularly with its bracketed serifs.” This choice was complemented by Century Oldstyle and Grot 12, creating a harmonious typographic system that could handle various hierarchies of information.

The brand’s logo, depicting a house, represents Audo’s unique approach to showcasing its products. Emil Hartvig, Creative Director, explains, “Instead of owning a showroom in Copenhagen, Audo decided to make their furniture part of a lifestyle experience. The brand remodelled a shipping office in Copenhagen’s old harbour, creating a boutique hotel with every room showcasing the brand’s products alongside a café, restaurant, co-working space and interior design reference library.” Representing “a pathway into the Audo universe,” the logomark depicts the entryway of the building. “It also serves as a classic category marker,” Hartvig adds, “where these unique and timeless symbols are used for storytelling and authenticity.”

Audo Copenhagen boasts a long history of collaborating with designers across the world, with a product line-up that is unified by a shared appreciation for high-quality craftsmanship. A core requirement of the typographic direction therefore was the ability to clearly communicate key information – from product names and their respective designers, to the legal and technical information on product packaging. “Our type selection is the brand’s main homage to the past; a visual expression of their foundation in the world of Danish design icons,” Mundy emphasises. “This styling allowed us to play with the tension between classic and modern, loud and quiet – a dichotomy exemplifying Audo’s brand story.”