How Only reworked blackletter for London night-time venue Palais

Palais is a 500-capacity night-time venue, set within a former department store in London – marking the return of a long-closed Peckham landmark to active cultural use. Manchester-based brand strategy and design agency Only was brought in to develop the identity, building it around a single organising idea: where music reigns. The wordmark sits at the centre of the system. Blackletter is an intentionally unusual choice for a nightclub, particularly one positioned around a serious sound system. “Blackletter has the right attitude, but we didn’t want it to feel overly decorative or nostalgic,” Only’s Creative Director Matthew Tweddle explains. The forms have been stripped back and rebuilt geometrically, with the rhombus shapes that appear throughout the letters drawn from the central diamond in the symbol. The result is a subtle contemporary twist on the genre, with diagonal terminals on the ‘P,’ stacked rhombuses inside the ‘a,’ and a diamond as the tittle of the ‘i’ – all giving the wordmark a feel closer to electronic music than something medieval. The symbol that informs those letter forms came first. Drawn from the first-floor architecture of the Jones & Higgins building that houses the venue, it abstracts a crown into five shapes set above a horizontal bar – four circles flanking a central diamond. It functions as a logomark in its own right, and as a visual key that connects the typography back to the building.