The Hatchery project was a 20-foot-tall climbable wooden tower based on one designed in the early 1900s by Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin. The Dallas version was destined to go to Burning Man, the huge arts and music festival in Nevada, and to go down in flames with the other 30+ CORE projects brought from all over the world.

The project needed a logo design to give it an identity for promotion and fundraising purposes, and to set it apart from the other CORE projects that would be working in parallel on their pieces. We designed the logo in the Russian Constructivist style to complement the time period of the original Russian tower project (which was never built).

Graphic style

Characteristics of Russian Constructivism include very strong graphics, elements running on diagonals, red and black color schemes and bold sans serif typefaces. What a fun style to mimic!

The Hatchery logo includes a simplified rendering of the tower (overly complex logos are trouble to reproduce in all the ways one might need to reproduce them, so it’s best to KISS — keep it simple stupid); in the background there is an abstract version of The Man with a star for his head (because we’re from Texas!) and a flame icon.

We chose the typefaces East Bloc (bold & chunky) and Heliotype (condensed) since they are reminiscent of faces from the early 1900s.

Promotional swag

As every good designer knows, a good logo works just as well in black and white as it does in color; thus we modified the artwork into a one-color version for tee shirt art. The shirts were used for fundraising and Kickstarter incentives. And wow, were they a hit! Reducing the logo to one color and printing it on a dark shirt as a graphic tee was very well received.

The logo, the fundraising and the tower project were all a huge success!

Shown here are the color logo, the black and white logo on a dark red shirt, and a patch, which was produced in red and black thread on a khaki background. Stickers and pins (not pictured) were also part of the campaign.

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