HIGHLIGHTS | Line and letter

Ever since there was once a Bauhaus and Swiss graphic design, it’s no surprise to anyone that a business chooses total minimalism as its visual identity. However, touching the basics of our written language tools, the letters, and just a few lines can still make an impact with novelty today. We selected projects that were made in the spirit of maximum minimalism. More brand identities to come!

“What happened first? The line or the letter?” one could ask. For sure, every letter is a line, but not every line is a letter, so these two concepts have had a close relationship for thousands of years. If we only think of the use of accent marks: ever since writing has been on the earth, misused lines have caused serious complications. We can think of the ancient clay tablets or the characters of the Roman Trajan’s Column shaping civilization— their relationship has an indisputable significance in the visual identities formed throughout our history.

Thanks to the refined characters of classicist letter design, lines, or lineages, lived their renaissance in contemporary book printing. The line art used to loosen the type-setting and lay-out also served to highlight important passages and titles. Later, avant-garde trends also preferred to use line art, but for the most part, representatives of the Bauhaus and Swiss graphic design dared to use it in the most puritanical way.

Letters and lines only. This relationship can also serve as the cradle and grave of many civilizations. The complete omission of decorativeness can leave behind an uncharacteristic, extremely emptied world with lost identity, where individuals lose their character, thereby becoming manageable and guidable.
No wonder capitalist economic characters and authoritarian powers prefer to use powerful yet neutral-looking pictorial identities in their visual communication. The question is, among so many creative creatures, do we have to fear total minimalism? Perhaps we will get an answer to this now, adventuring from the United States to Denmark.

Express Scripts Pharmacy | USA
R/GA Brand Design

Visual Identity Design For Humanio | Lagos, Nigeria
Paul Kelly

Baltic Amadeus / IT company branding | Vilnius, Lithuania
FOLK design agency
Regina Stonytė
Ignas Kozlovas

Bright Data | Toronto, Canada
Jharek Orleski

Alder | Copenhagen, Denmark
Aleksander Jezierski

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