BURNKIT - TRANSCRIPT
When we bring clients through, they get a really clear sense of how it is that we like to work and what it is like to work with us. It's a place where all things sort of click. I think that's kind of an interesting thing, considering we're in such a digitally oriented design firm, that physical spaces are still that important in terms of allowing people to understand an identity of a group of people, such as we are.
My name’s Dylan Staniul. I’m a partner and creative director here at Burnkit.
Burnkit’s always a place where we don't work internally in a competitive way, if you will, I mean people want to do well and win and fight for ideas that they believe in. But at the same time we have a policy here that everything is game in terms of anyone else grabbing or taking or improving upon anything in process.
So we encourage everything to get up to the crit wall as quickly as possible and not in some sort of like fully gestated state, but in terms of a few general concepts. Cause, very much of the time, there will be a suggestion that's just a word or a photo or a piece of type and that links onto something else for someone that's already thinking about it-the problem in a different way and it produces some really amazing results.
So I don't think that takes away anyone's, you know, takes away anyone's ownership but rather it sort of suggests that this is a place that we are incubating good things and we’re all part of how this comes out in the end.
In a way I think that is a good sign of a good mark or logo where it isn't literally saying anything much but allowing you to sort of put your own feelings into whatever that symbol is. Postmark doesn't mean anything in particular, but it appealed, you know, most likely because it didn't have a specific meaning so you could interpret it the way you wished. I think that sort of sense of nostalgia that the name had was appealing as well.
That kind of led us into the graphic identity itself so there is a bit of a sense of heritage in some of the typography that is used in terms of the wordmark itself. Especially in terms of a logo that we really like to take the typography and then add custom touches that give it its own uniqueness. But then also we paired it also with this symbol, this sort of chevron-y shape that kind of does pick up a little bit maybe on the Postmark concept, but very kind of stylized and graphic in the way that it's its own symbol.
So the combination of those two pieces really created a nice contrast and so they weren't two things that you would typically kind of mate together, unless we went through the process that we did.
Working with Ballet BC has been amazing. Super contemporary ballet company. Their approach to their work is unabashedly modern I'd say they really aren't interested in tutus and appealing to nostalgia in a way that's going to compromise their vision, in terms of producing something that's like utterly contemporary.
The logo itself is one that breaks rules; there’s far too many components to it. It's not clear exactly what it is that it’s meant to describe, but there is a rhythm to it and there is a sense of space that’s left over that you, as the viewer, are going to need to fill. So there is an engagement there that I think mates well with their brand and that's why they gravitated toward it.
Then we took that and built a really, I would say, rigid, classic, modern, typography system for it to live within. The reason why that comes across and is expressive in its final form is because we knew it was going to be combined with these incredible athletic, physical, images of these dancers. So you get these two opposites almost and the tension they create is, you know, what people love about the brand. For the past three or four seasons now we’ve been evolving it as we go.
Everything that we are doing here is sort of propped up by these very very small kinds of assumptions that we all make about the value of these lines or pieces of typography that we are putting together in this form and so you need to have a lot of will power behind that, both internally and in terms of the client relationships.