September Industry

Can you tell us about SAKS gallery, and the specific requirements of the brief?
SAKS — the initials standing for its owners Sibylle Axarlis and Kristin Stein — is a contemporary art gallery located in Geneva, mostly devoted to up-and-coming artists. We were approached to design their visual identity a few months before the opening with a nice brief, which, besides their program, came under the form of a musical playlist — the imaginary soundtrack of the future gallery, ranging from the Dead Kennedys to Drive by Truckers.

How did Gavillet & Rust approach the project, and what level of involvement did the client have how closely was the client involved in the development of the identity?
Over the last decade, communication in the contemporary art world has too often meant full bleed colour images and the same plain visual codes as for whatever kind of product, as you can notably see by flipping through the first 200 pages of a magazine like Art forum… As a result of this profusion of visuals, the images and their meaning simply undermine each other. Therefore we decided to work on a concept which could function without images, but still express the owners’’ idiosyncrasies and SAKS as a particular place in a graphic way, to avoid a strictly neutral or structural design.
          So it was the perfect context to design custom lettering. At the first meeting we proposed typographic sketches for the four letters SAKS. It was immediately accepted by the client who understood the direction in which we were heading and the no-image policy. Their trust avoided any compromises in the development process and they didn’t interfere at all. After the first show, Sibylle and Kristin came up with the proposal to sometimes use colours on the invitation cards, instead of the strict black hot foil that we had planned. We initially dreaded the idea, but the result proved to work really well and enriched the identity without altering it.

The identity itself is focused around a bespoke logotype developed with Tobias Rechsteiner that is a ‘mix of 1950s cool with today’s directness’. Can you tell us about this concept?
To design the logotype, we mixed different typographic sub-genres. We had already designed line typefaces for a few book covers like Tom Burr’s – ‘Extrospective’ or Ari Marcopoulos’ – ‘The Chance is Higher’ that interested us for their elementary simplicity— they somehow work as a skeleton of typographic commonplaces. While we wanted to keep this basic aesthetic, we were also interested in to developing something more graphic and particular, to make the logotype work on its own.
          Aesthetically, the American 1950s were one of the visual references for the gallery owners in terms of music, visual arts and classic elegance. We researched the graphic structure of neon lettering from that period as used in shop or hotel windows. We were inspired by both their geometry and construction method, as the different modules that compose each character remain distinct in a more or less visible way, which gives a certain materiality to the letters. We therefore added a second line to develop this aesthetic, going in a more illustrative or crafted direction that would integrate characteristics from these ornamental letterings. This appears more obviously in some letters like the S or the Q that integrate the idea of an drawn stroke.

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