Sasyk Mihal on branding Good City Kids, a new marketplace for art and design

Prague-based designer and art director Sasyk Mihal has rebranded LA design store Les Autres to become an explorative retail platform. Now called Good City Kids, the store represents a global range of emerging artists and designers, providing an online space through which to sell their goods and artworks.

“The biggest challenge of the brief was to find something that worked with a wide range of art styles, designers’ objects and everything that could possibly be on a GCK website,” recalls Sasyk. “Because of that, we decided to go with very minimal branding with an ownable wordmark, clean typography, simple layouts and photography, and a colour palette that can complement any colourful illustration or object.”

The wordmark Sasyk created is based on the Kormelink typeface by Wise Type, which he customised so that it could be used “by itself or as a part of the text block”. His other typographic choices include opting for both serif and sans serif fonts – respectively, Cigars and Nuckle by Heavyweight Type Foundry – and a monogram version of the wordmark which can be used over photography or as a pattern.

The photography itself consists of classic polaroid and 35mm film shots of, quite literally, “cities and kids”. When sourcing the imagery, Sasyk says a photo filter was occasionally required where the photograph was not shot on film, “which looks a bit retro but not in a cheesy way”. This imagery sits comfortably alongside a reserved colour palette of black and light grey, which allows the louder elements of the branding and the bold designs and colours of the artists’ work to do the heavy lifting.

Speaking on his sources of inspiration during the process, Sasyk says, surprisingly, there weren’t any: “This whole project was done very intuitively, and this direction was the first one that came to mind. I did create two more design directions for the initial presentation, both of which had some references, but the client immediately picked the one you see, with no changes required… It felt like a dream collaboration.”