Studio Kardum

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.

Brand Identity

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.