Rizes
Rizes means roots, and the place is where the Games have theirs. The whole identity is one vertical stroke holding both of those at once.
The brief
This was a test. It came to me as part of a job application, between the first interview and the second: a brand for Rizes, an F&B unit at Ancient Olympia. I had a few days and nobody to ask. What I did know was that everything about that place has been used before — the columns, the flame, the rings, the wreath — and that the quickest way to look like everybody else was to reach for any of them directly.
The idea
Rizes means roots. The site is where the Games have theirs. So the identity had to grow downwards rather than decorate outwards, and everything ended up in a single vertical stroke in the middle of the word, where the I and the Z share one body. Read it one way and it is a column, standing the way the columns of the Temple of Zeus still stand. Read it another and it is the torch, upright, lit every four years in that exact spot. Read it a third and it is a root, going down into the ground the whole place is made of. One line, three readings, none of them illustrated and none of them explained on the page — you simply feel the weight of them. The spiral at the top is the volute of an Ionic capital, which is also the shape of something growing. And the colours come from the ground there rather than from the flag: olive, sage, stone brown, with a pale blush for the light.
The detail
The lockup lives or dies on that shared stroke, and shared strokes are expensive. Every millimetre the Z leans changes how quickly the eye reads the word, and there is a point where it stops being elegant and starts being a puzzle. I spent most of the time there, not on the concept: setting the word large, then small, then very small, then walking away and coming back to see whether it still said Rizes at a glance. It is the kind of work nobody ever notices, because when it is right the answer looks obvious, and when it is wrong nobody can tell you why they did not like it.
- Brand identity for Rizes, an F&B unit at Ancient Olympia
- A brief set during a job application, 2024
- The I and the Z share one vertical stroke, read as column, torch and root
- Palette drawn from the site: olive, sage, stone brown and a pale blush
- An exercise, not a commission
- Personal case study · all rights reserved
Since then
It did what it was meant to do: the second interview came, and then the job.
I went up to Ancient Olympia soon afterwards. Not to check anything — simply because I wanted to be in the place I had spent all those days thinking about. To walk among the olive trees and the fallen columns, to hear its history standing inside it instead of reading it, to have two slow days with nothing to answer. I had drawn roots for that ground before I had ever walked on it, and walking on it turned out to be the better half.