Early Work · Ljubljana and Lima
I did not know I had a method until I put these six next to each other. They are all doing the same thing: hiding the idea inside the name.
The brief
These come from the two years before anybody was paying me properly: an internship in Ljubljana at LONI DBS, the studio everybody called Bellini & Friends, and three weeks of volunteering in Lima. A Slovenian natural cosmetics house, a publisher I invented for my own thesis, a band of friends, a bakery, a health economics consultancy and a children's project in Pamplona Alta. Two of them were pitched and the other route was chosen. Two were never taken into production. One was never real to begin with. They are gathered here because separately they are student work, and together they are the beginning of something.
The idea
Look at them in a row and the habit is embarrassingly obvious. Health Economic Solutions is health and economics in one company, so the crossbar shared by the H and the E turns green and becomes a pharmacy cross, and the S is redrawn as the serpent of Asclepius. Superlearner Peru had PERU sitting inside its own name all along, so I pulled it out in red and left it there. Ljutri is Ljubljana and tri folded into one word, so the letters fold too, the L and the J joining into a shape that is already a U. Persi Angel promised angels, so one gold ring does duty as a halo, a piece of jewellery and a spa stone at once. Dob'r Pek rested on a rhyme in Slovene that I could not even hear, and the mark had to carry an old baker and a new shop in the same two shapes. Alma Libre means free soul, so the seeds leave the dandelion. Six times, the same instinct: do not draw a picture next to the name, find what is already inside it and make it visible. I could not have told you that at the time. I can see it now.
The detail
The conditions were never good, and that turns out to have been the education. In Ljubljana I was designing a pun in a language I did not speak, which meant asking Mr Loni again and again whether it still sounded right, and learning to trust an ear that was not mine. In Lima I had two days, a borrowed computer and a program I had never opened, because there was funding waiting on the Superlearner logo. When there is no time and no tools you cannot try fifteen versions and pick the prettiest. You have to decide what the idea is and then execute exactly that. I have never worked as fast since, and I have never again been as certain about what I was making before I started making it.
- Six brand identities made between 2015 and 2017
- Persi Angel, Alma Libre, Ljutri and Dob'r Pek: internship at LONI DBS, the Bellini & Friends studio, Ljubljana
- Health Economic Solutions and Superulearner: three weeks of volunteer work in Lima, Peru
- Alma Libre was made for my degree thesis, alongside the Bucay book
- Most of these were proposals that did not go into production; each is labelled on its own page
- Early work · rights reserved by LONI DBS and the respective clients
- 6 identities · 2 countries
- 2 days for the two Lima marks
- 2015 – 17
Since then
Most of these never went into service. The bakery chose Mr Loni's route, which is the identity it still uses. Health Economic Solutions carry a different logo today. Persi Angel was never taken into production, the band kept the sketch they had fallen for, and Alma Libre was a publisher that only ever existed on my own book.
That is the ordinary arithmetic of being twenty-four and new, and I have stopped minding it. The surfaces here have dated — the grain and the kraft paper and the pebbles all belong to the years they were made in, and I would draw every one of them differently now. What has not dated is the reasoning, and Peru turned into something else as well: it went well enough that when I wanted that kind of work again I went looking on the other side of the world, and that became VolNepal.