Dorsch Gallery identity

The following article/blog post has been taken from the Creative Review website, it was posted by Gavin Lucas, 29 March 2010. The blog post talks about the new identity/look for the US based art gallery, Dorsch. Designed by Bellamy Studio, the identity incorporates 3 overlooked fonts, Arial (regular and bold), Times (regular and italic), and Courier New (regular and bold). I personally thought you should only use no more than two fonts in a single design but Bellamy Studio shows exactly how you can intelligently put three fonts together that most designers would shy away from using.

While we haven't seen many sites that makes use of the @font-face CSS rule (which allows web designers to design sites using any font they want – providing they get the right licence), we've just seen an identity for a Miami art gallery that embraces three of the very typefaces that soon web designers won't have to rely on…

Bellamy Studio was asked by Dorsch Gallery to work with its exisiting logo (consisting of five blocks) and devise a new graphic identity system. The studio thus created a brand guidelines document for the gallery explaining how to (and how not to) use a set of three typefaces and logotype in the production of various documents such as letters, posters, promotional postcards and magazine ads. The gallery itself will apply these as it sees fit to its website in the coming weeks. The posters shown here are the first to be created by the gallery using its new brand guidelines...

The typefaces used in the identity are all web-safe system fonts that perhaps get overlooked by designers because of their ubiquity: Arial (regular and bold), Times (regular and italic), and Courier New (regular and bold). The identity also utilises a circular graphic device, lending posters for the gallery a clean, modernist look.

"The point is that this new identity is totally versatile and recognisable in its simplicity," explains Bellamy Studio's Andrew Bellamy. "The gallery had no consistency at all to their previous designs, each one was different so there was no brand recognition. With this new identity, an image can be in the circle, the circle can be an overlay solid on a full bleed image, the circle itself can be a photograph of a circle etc – it doesn't matter because the format and circle are consistent enough to keep the identity clear without becoming boring."