How Recent™ gave Spectrum one identity for music, wellness and place

Amsterdam and Abu Dhabi-based design studio Recent™ designed the identity for Spectrum, a six-day music and wellness experience in Aruba where late-night electronic music sits alongside daytime rest and recovery, in a format built to travel. The brief asked for a unified identity system that could hold all three of its parts: music, wellness and place. Spectrum chose Recent™ not just for its broad portfolio and international client list, but also the fact that the studio's founders are from the island. “We can be loud one moment and very calm the next, so we needed an identity that could move between those expressions, still feel premium and always be recognisable as Spectrum,” details Spectrum’s Co-founder & Creative Director, Lisander Isebia. Reviewing the existing brand guide, Recent identified many of the same things that Spectrum felt needed developing. From there, the work went beyond the way the brand looked, to how it would function during the event. Three pillars structure everything that Spectrum does – Ritual for gathering, Pulse for music and Body for wellness. “They are three dimensions of one continuous experience, and we felt that idea had to live inside the mark itself, not only in the language around it,” explains Recent’s Managing Director Mario Gonsalves. Recent started the mark from Spectrum’s first letter and interlaced three ‘S’ forms, one each for Ritual, Pulse and Body, into a continuous figure whose strands cross over and under each other until no individual ‘S’ can be cleanly lifted out. “It resolves as a symbol first and letters second. That was intentional, because it means the mark holds its meaning for someone who never stops to count the three S forms, while quietly rewarding those who do,” Gonsalves observes. “Take the obvious reading of the theme and do the disciplined, distilled version instead.”