Studio Kardum is a Vancouver based design studio providing full-service design for real-estate development, corporate, hospitality, and private clients.
With 15+ years of experience in interior design, project management, creative direction, and styling, Owner and founder Christine Kardum is no stranger to the interior design industry. While her work has played a significant role in shaping the city, Christine never had a proper visual identity created for her design practice. Christine reached out to us during the beginning of lockdown, and while it was strange not being able to work together in person, Christine’s warm personality and passion for design still left an impression on us through the form of Zoom calls and emails. This definitely inspired our approach to the design of her brand identity.

<h2>Brand Identity</h2>
During our discovery phase, we identified one of Studio Kardum’s brand pillars as being “inherently human”. Those words truly resonated with our team and led us into exploring humanist sans serif typefaces that provided a contemporary yet natural appearance. We decided to design a custom humanist font, creating a limited set of letters to make up the Kardum wordmark. After creating the wordmark for the full name as “Studio Kardum”, we decided together with Christine that her surname “Kardum” would be unique and strong enough as a wordmark. Using just her last name as the wordmark also reinforces the idea of a personal and intentional aspect to her brand.
To bring contrast to the organic wordmark, we use Neue Haas Grotesk as the main brand typeface which provides a more neutral and grounding tone of voice in all brand documents and reflects the restraint and understated nature of Christine’s design approach.
During our conversations, Christine mentioned how the simple act of creating division in a space can evoke different feelings about that same space. This sparked the idea for creating a simple grid system that can be used as a subtle visual element on print and screen collateral. By drawing lines that dissect a surface area, we are in the same way, dividing up space and causing the space to be viewed in a new light.

<h2>Website</h2>
The design of the Studio Kardum website mimics the idea of a house with its different rooms and divisions. Using this visual motif, we aimed to evoke the emotional feeling of entering a home. We envisioned opening the entrance door into a beautiful, spacious, and relaxing living room 1 (fading image carousel). Continuing to walk past the corridor, we entered a room adorned with framed artworks and a window facing a small backyard 2 (featured projects section). The artworks guide us down the staircase 3 where we find a wall of bookshelves 4 (project index). This approach helps us create content pacing and establish a more deliberate approach to the grouping and presentation of information.
Carrying the brand system forward, the website design utilizes the visible grid structure, displaying both the vertical and horizontal lines that divide up information on the page.
The website features a very simple three page menu in &#8216;projects&#8217;, &#8216;studio&#8217; and &#8216;contact&#8217;. With the understanding that interior and construction work often takes time, the projects overlay showcases both completed project case studies and in-progress projects to provide a fuller picture of the full body of work at Studio Kardum. Each project page also includes an area to highlight the materials used within the project as a way to offer greater details into the design process of each build.

Website

Services

Location

Feature

Branding

Identity

Studio Kardum

Following our interim redesign of the LA city guide in 2017, Cereal approached us again in 2018 to update their other printed guides ahead of their reissuing with a redesigned cover through Abrams Books. We were grateful for the opportunity to extend the visual direction we established for the magazine now onto the printed guide books as well to create a consistent design direction across Cereal&#8217;s printed material.
Cereal&#8217;s city guides have often been our go-to resource prior to visiting one of the metropolitan cities they feature, so it was a delight to have the chance to reimagine the books as avid users of the guides ourselves. From 2017–2020, our redesign of the city guides included London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Copenhagen. In addition to the renewal of the interior content, the guide books were also reintroduced with a new softcover with a debossed inset photo and black foiling—a design made in collaboration with Rich and included a subtle reference to Cereal&#8217;s self-published book, <a href="https://portal.studiofaculty.com/work/these-islands/">These Islands</a>.
While most city guides may offer a general overview of highlights and iconic attractions, Cereal&#8217;s city guides certainly act more as a summary of the city from their distinctive point of view, offering photo essays, interviews with celebrated local creatives, as well as a suggested one day itinerary. The result is akin to spending a day in the city with Rich and Rosa as they share their personal favourite spots with you.

<h2>Design</h2>
Having worked with Cereal in the past, we were able to jump right into the design with a clear understanding of their brand. To begin the design process: we reviewed and analyzed their past city guides; compared them to other existing ones; and noted how typically overwhelming a city guide can be. Pages are usually flooded with information, crammed to fill every inch of real estate. We believed this reality made Cereal’s guide unique, thanks to its simple and clean page layouts; therefore, we wanted the new design to retain these attributes. Cereal’s way of travel is meant to be relaxing and we wanted the guide to reflect this. However, unlike a magazine or coffee table book, the guidebook needed to be robust and useful on the road. With this in mind, we decided to keep the overall structure and feeling, but refine the layout and revisit some elements where improvements could be made.
The venues&#8217; intro spread1 is one area where we spent quite a bit of time on as we found it to be the most important layout in the guidebook. In the previous guide, each venue would have a full title and text page dedicated to the address, phone number, and website. We felt this space could be better allocated to showcase more photos of the venues—providing more examples of the venues to the reader. To allow readers to have easy navigation, we placed the information consistently at the top left corner so it can be easily identified when flipping through the book. A double-page spread template was added for the flexibility of featuring landscape and/or portrait photos. We also considered page colour to provide clearer distinction between sections in the guide book. When the reader observes the edge of the book, they can see the distinction between white pages—representing venues and dark grey pages for the interviews and essays.

Credits

Print

Cereal City Guides

We’ve been fortunate enough to work with Gaby Bayona, owner of Oremony Design Corp. on several of her endeavours (Truvelle, Aesling, Halseene, Lovenote, to name a few) so when she asked us to take on the rebrand and site design for her modelling/artist agency, Stranger Agency, we were more than happy to contribute to such a meaningful and important project. Stranger agency grew from the need to find unique local talent for her other businesses, and has continued to grow into one of Vancouver’s go-to boutique agencies (we’ve worked with Stranger Agency for other client photoshoots in the past).
“Stranger Than Your Average,” Stranger is a Vancouver-based modeling agency representing a diverse selection of talent across a variety of age, size, ethnicities, pronouns and abilities. Stranger is founded in promoting the many types of beauty in the world and is also redefining beauty in the process.

Branding
Our brand concept for Stranger is inspired by the idea of seeing eye to eye—embracing each others differences while meeting at a shared place of acceptance and belonging in the strange. This concept encapsulates holding space to understand, accept, and represent for all those who have been fighting to be seen and heard, redefining what beauty means in the process. It is confrontational, unapologetic and disruptive of what we see as normal. Through photography, graphic elements, and bold type treatments, this concept aims to highlight the unique characteristics of each individual, while working together and uniting under the common thread of being imperfectly human.
The final brand identity includes three versions of the wordmark that can be used interchangeably throughout brand collateral. In addition to the various weights of Right Grotesk (narrow and wide versions), we also utilized an outlined version of the Spatial Black weight to add to the visual diversity of the brand. As part of the graphic system, an oval shape is used repeatedly throughout the brand as a way to uniquely crop an image, a way of grouping information or as the outline for a button on the website.

<h2>Website</h2>
The brand direction and visuals were translated to the Stranger Agency website design. Developed by our team in-house, we strived to include subtle movements and interactions in the website to give the site a unique and interactive experience. In celebrating each model&#8217;s preferred gender neutral pronouns, the site categorizes talent by &#8220;she/her&#8221;, &#8220;they/them&#8221;, &#8220;he/him&#8221; and highlights new models under the &#8220;new faces&#8221; category.
The model page is set up with an array of layout options allowing each model page to be unique composed. Viewers can switch from lifestyle photos to the model&#8217;s digitals by clicking the digitals link at the bottom of the page.

Stranger Agency

Brand Identity

2020

Website

View More Projects