The Swedish side of Qleek
courtesy of Oda Haugerud
Finding the right graphic designer for the project of your life is no easy task. Especially when good design is as crucial as it is for Qleek.
The wood, the hexagonal shape and the purity of the Qleek experience are powerful and bold design decisions that required time and numerous iterations to emerge. It was out of question that a graphic designer would ruin all that hard work.
99designs is the Tinder of graphic design. We wanted to meet our designer the old fashioned way… The exciting way!
In our quest for the right person, we decided not to go for a crowdsourcing design platform. It felt like going to Tinder when you’re looking for your soul mate. We wanted to find an artist, not a match!
And that is why we have spent a long time with no decent logo and no visual langage whatsoever.
And then we have met Oda.
Oda Haugerud is a talented Swedish graphic designer who combines analogue and digital techniques to create simple and beautiful artwork. Her minimalist organic creations and her interest in both print and digital resonated with our own idea of modern design.
The wait was over.
After a couple of emails, Oda teamed up with Johanna Hartzheim our in house product designer to rethink the whole Qleek visual identity. An extensive research process followed.
The first challenge was to come up with a cover design that would underline the tapp as a creative medium. It needed to be informative by design, but also coherent and beautiful when combined with other tapps.
With a simple layout and a title engraved on its front and its side, the tapp was designed to be an empty canvas for the user’s own creativity.
Different playful layouts were considered, but we came to the conclusion that the hexagon is already a perfect canvas to play with. It provided both enough freedom and constraint to entice creativity, and still imperceptibly incarnated our mindset.
In addition to be a creative experience, Qleek is also a reminder of how a physical library can be part of one’s personality. This trait had to be strongly intertwined with the overall appeal of the product. Thus, the tapps were designed to be displayed together and provide a big, cohesive and unified library without uniformity.
To emphasize our choice of noble materials, Oda had also designed various handmade natural patterns that reflected the “crafty” feeling of the wood. These would punctuate different parts of the Qleek experience like the packaging and the website.
When rethinking the logo, Oda tapped into the organic side of Qleek without losing its digital counterpoint. The basis of the logo is a globe representing the ubiquity of the Internet with a series of artifacts that embody the slow-tech side of Qleek.
At the end of the day, she managed to build an entire visual identity system that is an invitation to sharing and an ode to the physical collection.
