Case studies

A path for the eye and the heart

When you see the identity of MoMA Members, the first thing you’ll probably notice is a linear path – it’s everywhere, and cuts and threads through everything. The line or the path was born out of the deep research that Boston-based studio Regrets Only undertook when designing the identity for the celebrated museum’s membership programme. “During our research, we came across an experiment MoMA conducted over a decade ago called “I went to MoMA and…” It was a simple yet powerful prompt inviting visitors to fill in the blanks and share their museum experience on note cards,” Designer Ariana Gupta tells us. “The responses ranged from playful to deeply personal, and revealed how visiting MoMA meant something different to each individual. “Your MoMA” was our translation of that insight, and guided the identity which celebrates the personal connections members make with art and each other, and as a result discovering a museum that is uniquely their own.”

A living typeface

Comprising 40,000 islands and islets, the ‘Archipegalo of Finland,’ Saaristo, is a place like no other, taking the title of ‘the most diverse archipelago in the world.’ It’s a place that needs to be seen to be believed. To attract more visitors, they reached out to BOND’s Helsinki studio to help them do just that with a visually arresting identity. “Our goal was to visually capture the feeling of being there – to ensure the identity felt true to the place, not like something imposed from the outside,” Senior Designer Kasperi Salovaara tells us. “It was all about distilling the essence of Saaristo into a visual language that felt both authentic and evocative.”

The team was free to take a more conceptual approach than typical tourism branding. Anchored by a set of guiding themes – simple and rich, thoughtful and kind, wild-hearted and true – BOND let Saaristo speak for itself.

Chunky text and juicy sandos

Romeo’s is Berlin’s first dedicated sandwich shop, and as the first, it wanted to do things a bit differently than normal fast-food shops. For its identity, the brand wanted both a bit of the past and the present – namely, an aesthetic that takes notes from old-school advertising, and then flips it on its head. Romeo’s needed a creative who was cut for the challenge and so, they decided to collaborate with designer Carla Palette. “The visual direction of Romeo’s is inspired by old-school advertising aesthetics, particularly vintage fast-food marketing as well as fast food culture. The brand draws from nostalgic visual styles while modernising them to create a fresh, sophisticated take on fast food. The combination of bold typography, a classic serif, and a nostalgic yet refined colour palette reinforces this connection,” Palette tells us.

Cinematic past and present

Where do you begin when designing the identity of a cinematographer? Someone whose portfolio boasts a rich selection of visual imagery, with each frame telling a unique story. With a style that caters to urban, youth-driven audiences, Amsterdam-based cinematographer and MōVI operator Tobias van Daal reached out to multidisciplinary creative studio Twice Shy (a venture by Tarryn Blackwood and Jeroen van den Bogaert) for an elevated portfolio site, something that would help him to stand out in a competitive job market in the entertainment industry. It would need to complement and align with his existing work featuring “vibrant, gritty settings” that resonate with his audience, all while capturing Van Daal’s personality.

An endless loop of creativity

“Unlike AI systems that extract styles without credit,” says Jose Fresneda, Partner at The Collected Works, “TITLES empowers artists to define, monetise, and maintain ownership of their likeness.” This platform offers a tooling system for creating generative artworks along with a marketplace for showcasing and selling them. Fundamentally, artists are the core of the creative process, as each one trains their own models. Buyers can then mint their generated works – reflecting the unique style of each artist – using Ethereum, ensuring blockchain attribution. Every creation connects to a protocol that includes this clear attribution, establishing a basis for new interpretations while preserving authorship. According to Fresneda, “It’s all designed to sustain a living, interconnected creative ecosystem, where each new piece contributes to a larger artistic conversation.”

Why are we still calling them brand guidelines?

Welcome to The Shift, a series presented in collaboration with one of the world’s leading brand-building platforms, Frontify. Here, we’ll dive deep into the realm of flexible, dynamic branding. We’ll be tapping into the sharpest minds in design – from visionary studios to leading independent designers – to understand what it takes to build a dynamic identity.

Having delved deeply into the moving, flexing, adaptable world of fluid identities and the minds that make them, we had to know what it takes to design a technical platform for fluid brands. And as a comprehensive brand management platform that allows brands to create and maintain brand guidelines, why not ask Frontify?

Demystifying AI image generation

For quite some time now, the conversation about AI has revolved around it being a threat to craft – it’s seen as an easy way out, a menace for photographers and illustrators, or a tool that undermines creative authorship. But for Colin Dunn, CEO & Co-founder of image generator Visual Electric, that perception misses the big picture. Visual Electric is the playground where his team challenges that idea, and uses AI to empower creatives.

Built with designers in mind, Visual Electric offers an intuitive approach to AI image generation – one that isn’t about churning out generic been-there-seen-that visuals, but crafting bespoke, brand-specific imagery. It’s a tool that sits within the creative workflow, rather than overriding it. As Dunn says, agencies, brands and designers have already been using Visual Electric to great effect, not just to generate images but to define a visual language – creating styles that can be refined, iterated upon, and handed over as part of a larger identity system.

Mockups

“The introduction of a new medium doesn’t mean the death of another.”

Colin Dunn, Visual Electric
27th February 2025

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