Amateur(dot)rocks is an idea of Jose Bessega and Ivo Pallucchini. By working in several places around Latin America, Europe and the US, they have cultivated a global and diverse perspective. They define themselves as a nomad duo, and are currently based in Amsterdam. We talked with Jose and Ivo about their work for Studio Lore.
Studio Lore is a creative studio based at Amsterdam, formed by a collective of artists and writers from classical and non-traditional narrative backgrounds working to the world from a beautiful old monastery in the Red Light district.
One year ago we were based at Berlin until James Yeats Smith, Studio Lore’s creative director, invited us to Amsterdam to participate in a global campaign for a big sports brand. At the same time, the need to craft a new visual ID for the studio came up, and so it was that we worked side to side with James and a highly talented team in an enriching and collaborative creative process.
We didn’t know James until the first day we met by a video call and we matched immediately. By the other hand, Studio Lore went officially live early 2019 when we finished the visual identity, before that date it was in gestation process.
The studio name was already set by the time we started the process. Boyd Coyner, Studio Lore founder/ECD, was in charge of transmitting us the spirit, story, and ambition of the project.
The main objective was to develop a conceptual visual identity based on a contemporary, simple and bold aesthetic that makes Studio Lore stand out in the creative industry, and also works as a vehicle for unpredictable and meaningful storytelling that pursuit to impact culture.
“Lore” is the exchange of universal and easy to share stories, myths, and legends through word of mouth, so, we took as main inspiration the sound of spoken word. To represent orality graphically, we decided to take the phonetic language, a universal system that opens language up to everyone, as our visual and written tool. We used the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to form the foundation of this dynamic typographic visual identity that mixes regular characters with phonetic ones. We had the opportunity to work with typographer, Lucas Sharp (Sharp Type) developing a bespoke 53 characters phonetic alphabet that were applied across the brand identity.
Also, we integrated fire through photography inspired by the fact that ever since humans discovered fire, we’ve gathered around flames to tell stories. The role of Studio Lore is ignite modern-day campfires, and stoke conversation with stories that transcend race, culture, and creed.
Since the early sketches, Ogg Type Italic was heading the font shortlist for the brand phonetic language. We were looking for a serif with tons of personality, a wide spectrum of glyphs and some details that could convey the feeling of being reading a strange alphabet based on symbols. After a lot of team debate, we decided to go forward with Ogg from the New York-based type foundry, Sharp Type, but we were still missing 53 characters to complete the phonetic alphabet. So, we contacted Lucas Sharp and Chantra Malee to proposed a collaboration. Fortunately, they were very excited about the project and also, they were happy to extend Ogg to this new spoken world. We had a very smooth collaborative process with positive conversations and feedbacks that ended in a bespoke, beautiful and eye-catching phonetic alphabet for the new creative studio.
Following the line to create a brand that can be easily recognized and be different from the rest of the creative studios and agencies, we designed a website that was conceived to be another communicational and conceptual piece of the brand identity, not only as a showcase for work and studio information. We had the opportunity to work very closely with Arturo Castillo Delgado, a talented web developer based in Barcelona, that was in charge of the entire creative coding. To create a bold and disruptive website we invested a lot of thinking in each section, taking care of every word and pixel. Details like including social media aspect ratios in the galleries templates or creating a section based in a list of all the things we would love to see on flames and the chance to “burn them” by adding fire images, are some examples of the deep creative and developing process that we had as a team not only for the website but for the whole branding.
