Berkeley Institute

We partnered with the Berkeley Institute, a humanities center serving the UC Berkeley community, to create an eclectic brand that reflects the cultural and social movements native to Berkeley, CA. Taking inspiration from old book cover liners, quilt patterns, and stain glass ornaments, we crafted a brand rich with texture, form, and, meaning.

Like the interdisciplinary nature of the Berkeley Institute’s work, the graphic identity of its brand is eclectic, bringing together symbols, colors, type, and shapes of diverse traditions — from Medieval to mid-century and from early industrial to Arts & Crafts. But bringing diverse aesthetics into a cohesive graphic identity was a difficult feat to achieve, and we faced several challenges in the process.

First, we wanted to draw heavily from the Arts & Crafts movement that influenced Berkeley’s spin on early twentieth-century neoclassical architecture. We also wanted to draw from Berkeley’s mid-century protest culture. However, both of these aesthetic traditions have been "kitschified" beyond measure by commercial mass produced art and ornament. In order to make a unique, outstanding graphic identity, we needed to draw from these traditions in subtle ways without giving in to its most preposterously over-used motifs (think: the Macintosh font for Arts & Crafts, or funky geometric patterns for Mid-Century Modern).

So, we decided to embrace the lively motifs of very diverse traditions — we selected those that remain genuinely beautiful and humane without having had the life beaten out of them by mass production — and brought them together in an elegant way, to make something altogether new.

The result? A brand made up of early twentieth century block print patterns, a protest typeface inspired by Erling Viksjø’s brutalist Y-block (1956–70), folk art color palette, classic Roman illustrations (a nod to Berkeley’s neoclassical architecture), and a visual style defined by linotype typesetting and traditional book binding.

In the end, we have a graphic identity that is inspired by tradition without being weighed down by it, communicating both warm liveliness and intellectual seriousness.