Graphic Design & Architecture Inspiration

MAPA are an architectural studio with offices in Brazil and Uruguay. They create compact beautifully designed prefab homes. This compact house was prefabricated in a factory near the Uruguayan capital, before then transported 200 kilometres by truck to a picturesque olive grove surrounded by rolling hills. 

Fatih Hardal is a Graphic Designer, Typographer and Researcher. He graduated from Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts in 2019. During that same year he founded Hardal Studio. 

Jäger, is a highly crafted new typeface from Violaine & Jérémy It's now available is two two weights, bold and regular - plus a bunch of amazing ligatures. Jäger is described as a tribute to fine craftsmanship. The typeface is directly influenced by traditional techniques mastered by craftsmen. 

This New Zealand inspired house is located in José Ignacio Uruguay, but would feel right at home in the New Zealand countryside. Architect Martin Gomez was highly influenced from his time spent traveling the world - in particular the months spend in New Zealand. He describes the 'kiwi' style as something that transfers well into his local landscape, as does the use of timber. "We love working with wood," says Martin, whether natural or stained black. "Black is the best colour to go between the trees and the green farmland."

Sivak Partners are an award-winning team of architects and designers working in Ukraine and worldwide. They produce beautiful, minimal and highly crafted design solutions for their clients. They work with private and corporate clients, designing bathrooms, houses, apartments, offices, cafes, restaurants, hotels and more. These incredible bathroom and hotel room designs were for a recent beach hotel in Odessa, Ukraine. Truly incredible work.

Recently I started exploring some new typography layouts and bespoke fonts from VJ Type. I thought visualising some of the motivational quotes I've been collecting looked like a good place to begin. I've done a few variants below and will add more as I find them.

Artiva Design is a multi-discipline graphic design studio based in Genoa, Italy. They specialise in producing high impact minimalist branding and visual design communication. The studio was founded in 2003 by Daniele De Batté and Davide Sossi. Their distinctive style has a strong typographic and geometric aesthetic. It often leans toward pure black and white as a core colour palette. The spectacular volume and quality of work is defined by its rigorous use of the grid system. This is coupled with strong contrasting line weights and graphic pattern work.

Quim Marin is a graphic designer and art director based in Spain. He creates highly graphic eye catching posters that manage to cut through even in the busiest environments. 

For a while I've been wanting to showcase the full alphabet set of the new Love typeface. As mentioned in a previous post the font was designed in 2018 in Paris by Jérémy Schneider - the typeface is a beautiful blend of contrasting elements, characterised by its big counter-forms and thin stems. Take a look at all the font forms below, both light and dark backgrounds have been included. Perhaps some of the most exciting parts exist in the special characters, the '@' symbol and '&' are superb and worth checking out.

Midnight in Woody’s color is a self directed poster project by visual artist Selman Hosgor. 

MultiAdaptor is the design studio behind Google's Campus brand identity. The rebrand was positioned slightly away from the main Google brand and serves the special network of google funded start-ups. The design helps capture the energy and excitement of start-up culture, and supports the spirit and energy of the entrepreneurs, founders, employees and investors that make up the Campus network.

VJ Type recently created this fantastic new custom font for Welcome to the Jungle magazine. The typeface has 4 weights and italics. The stylised upper letter forms have a number of clever customised curves. This create some truly bespoke personality, just take a lot at the editorial layout designs below.

Here are some new business card designs by Abukoo. They have a distinctive illustrated style. Stay tuned for a few for design variants in this space, there are a bunch of alternate color ways included in the pack which give you options to create something bespoke. Check out the new Indesign templates here.

The Violaine & Jérémy studio have now added another stunning font to their collection at VJ-Type foundry. Cako is a quirky combination of unique graphic letter shapes and serifs. 

I recently designed a new minimal look for a potential Sushi Restaurant, love the graphic simple nature of the design. It could potentially expand into a full scale identity system. The project is purely speculative at the moment.

Parsons Branding recently completed their own brand identity. The beautifully crafted design system is a showpiece for their core offer. The is firm based in Cape Town, South Africa and have been building a reputation for high end brand strategy and quality creative for over 10 years.