MMBP & Associates’ eclectic identity for KLKTN balances mass typography and modern technology

London-based creative consultancy MMBP & Associates have crafted a visual world for digital-collectable-platform Kollektion (KLKTN) – a blockchain-powered endeavour set up to provide online experiences and content bundles, known as ‘Moments’ – supported by music, entertainment and fintech.

Calling upon the aesthetics and themes ever-present in the platform’s intersection between culture and technology, the resulting identity is unapologetically brash. Chromatically combining luxury, pop culture and contemporary tech to create a variable bonanza of creative expression, while simultaneously providing the variability for the brand to flex – a feature that even translates to the variable length of the wordmark.

The identity’s primary typeface, ​​Goudy Old Style, was chosen by MMBP in reference to mid-to-late 20th-century advertisements – a key influence behind Kollektion’s core graphic language. Making up the mark as well as the supporting text, the condensed serif construction of the typeface is directly reminiscent of the type found in early Apple, IBM and Nike marketing. “I've always admired American advertising graphic design in the late ’70s to ’80s,” Artistic Director Hank Park tells us, discussing the considerations behind the choice.

“A slightly condensed serif typeface always looks attractive,” he adds, “but it can run the risk of coming across as retro,” an aesthetic in opposition to KLKTN’s philosophy. Implemented alongside contemporary content, however, Park notes how Goudy Old Style avoids this trap, instead “bringing an element of design craft to the digital environment.”

Supporting the use of Goudy Old Style is an idiosyncratic grid structure and a systematic KLKTN pattern; translating the extravagance, diversity and avant-garde attitude of their service. “The brand name reads as ‘collection,’” Park explains, “so I literally tried to collect typefaces for the pattern,” noting the 10,000+ font files on his computer hard drive he collected over twenty years to achieve this.

“There are so many interesting licence free fonts on the internet,” he recalls, “so I’ve spent days looking at fonts I had but never tried for other projects because these kinds of fonts don't really work for branding,” citing legibility or quality as reasons they weren’t used previously. Brought together as a cascading, orderly motif to represent and showcase KLKTN, the pattern is used to provide the brand with vibrancy and colour. “Our content is very digital-looking and vivid,” Managing Director Julien Beaupré Ste-Marie tells us, “to balance it all it felt good to use a reduced colour palette,” he concludes, resulting in a “clean and sophisticated look that works with any content that might come our way.”

MMBP & Associates

KLKTN