We speak to the Portuguese studio charged with creating new branding to help accessories company Qu’on expand across Asia.
"The design is inspired by the collision of two universes," says Pedro Serrão: the "simple, smooth, almost minimal forms" of the Far East, and the "wisdom and know-how" of experienced handcraft practitioners. Serrão is co-founder of Portuguese multidisciplinary design studio This is Pacifica, the team behind recent branding work and logo design for accessories company Qu'on.
The project takes in everything from stationery and creative business cards to leather book and key covers, all using typography created especially for Qu'on. "Our approach," says Serrão, "is mostly creative. We don’t focus on a specific formula; we’re inspired by the essence of things. The problem is part of the solution: if we deny it, we miss the essential question.
Raw material
"The briefing was based on several assumptions that we consider essences in defining a creative approach," Serrão continues. "The enhancement of the raw material of the brand, the leather, and the definition of a visual grammar."
The typeface designed especially for the project has Japanese influences, and represents Qu'on as a 'non-verbal brand'. "The realisation," Serrão says, "consists in the purification of graphical elements - visual simplification based on leather as a texture, material and experience of life."
This article was originally published in Computer Arts issue 217.
