Polish art historian Magdalena Skrabska hired me to design a logo and a business card for her. She specializes in medieval and Renaissance architecture. She wanted a logo that would suggest her areas of interest while incorporating her identity. It had to be simple and direct also.

Once again my architecture background came to the rescue. It wasn’t long, in fact, before I was able to find what I was looking for: the Roman arch.

Iconic architectural device, the arch lends itself to many uses. We can find it in the windows and cloister of Medieval churches and in many Renaissance buildings but its use in ancient Roman acqueducts is particularly powerful.

You can see the letter “m” hidden in the repeating spans and that’s what I went for.
Having made sure to avoid the “McDonald’s effect”, I decided to employ a simple positive/negative combination to trick the eye into alternately seeing the “m” and the archway. This is put inside a square, which gives the logo a sense of stability and a professional look. A battlement, the emblematic element of Medieval castles, was added to the top of the square. The result is a logo that despite its simplicity is quite memorable and works in all sizes and colors, thus addressing all basic tenets of logotype design.

For the business card we chose the vertical orientation as a hint to architecture’s strong tendency to emphasize verticality (think Medieval towers and Gothic cathedrals). Magdalena’s name and profession appear smack in the middle of the card. This is required as they are the most important pieces of information. These two lines of text define two squares: the top one is “held in place” by the (square) logo, the bottom one by the phone number, arranged in a square to create symmetry with the logo. Finally, since we read from top to bottom,  the email address functions as visual closure.

I really like how this business card turned out: despite containing very little information and very essential shapes it looks fresh and original while maintaining a clean, professional look.

Read what Magdalena had to say about our collaboration on this project.