branding
Branding project for the cultural organization Aradul de Altădată, a committee dedicated to the preservation of historical artefacts and buildings from the city of Arad, Romania.
Main train station of Arad. Recently renovated, one of Romania's most modern stations, but maintained the historical motifs and brickwork.
Teodor Stoica is a Romanian journalist, historian and a dear friend of mine. He approached me with the idea of giving his passion project a new identity.
"Aradul de Altădată" translates to Arad of the Past. Arad is the city both Teodor and I grew up in. It started out as a Facebook page posting historical archives of the city, with Teo's incredible ability to showcase the city from an anthropological point of view. The page became extremely popular back home. All our friends and families knew about it as for most it provided a lot of nostalgia, while for younger generations it was fascinating to learn about our culture so intricately. It amassed over 44k followers in total and Teodor has been posting every day since 2011.
The purpose of giving the project an identity was to expand beyond just a Facebook page and, initially, into forming an association that can enact change within the city; namely, the preservation and restoration of historical buildings, as well as cultural tourism for Arad. Teodor is already the sole tour guide within the city for this reason. Arad has a smaller mainstream historical footprint compared to other bigger cities in Romania, and Teo's mission was to change that with a community-backed association.
The published book "Aradul de Altădată" from Teodor's blog. Click here to read his post.
Since then, Teodor has published a book with the same name. This has been an exciting process and achievement for him, as it has been in the works for a very long time. In the book, he offers the same level of detail and appreciation that his viewers have come to appreciate, as well as his invaluable and unique flair to the general theme of our city's history. I was extremely honoured and elated to see my design on the cover of a book that represents a significant part of my childhood and adolescence.
You can read Teodor's full insight into the process of writing the book as well as the challenges it represented by clicking on the image above. A translation should be available on the page.
The initial version of the logo began with the symbolic representation of the page’s main focus: social awareness on historical buildings around the city. The “AA” logomark is stylized to represent the most common roof styles in our city. Combined with a colour scheme that is meant to illustrate a more vintage aesthetic.
To further make use of the unique logomark, I created a series of icons that could be used to represent the different states of buildings currently in our city. From left to right: buildings about to be demolished, buildings in need of restoration and buildings that have been restored. This also served as a way to further reinforce his brand’s image across his social media channels.
The second concept that I developed is a more refined and simplified version, which is closer to the final logo used now. I used the window arches of Arad’s main train station as a template and attempted to use the two As in the logomark to symbolize Arad of the past and Arad of the present, modern day. The train station is the perfect symbol for this, as it is one of the buildings in Arad which was tactfully modernized without losing its cultural value.
The final version of the logo is an evolution of this, in that Teodor chose it to be more compliant with existing official government bodies. The colour scheme has been changed to achieve a more professional outlook for this same reason. “DM Sans” is the typeface I chose which has the best readability, wider letters for a subtle dated aesthetic, and most importantly support for the full Romanian alphabet, for future stationery purposes.
You can visit Teodor’s blog at:
teodorstoica.ro
His book can be purchased at:
editura.uvvg.ro/shop/istorie-si-studii-culturale/aradul-de-altadata/
And his Facebook page can be viewed at:
facebook.com/araduldealtadata
web design / branding
Portfolio and logo design for actress Lisa Pilerud. Completely custom-built website using open source software, hosted locally.