Réplica channels screen-printing nostalgia in ZeyZey’s vibrant identity

Miami’s concert scene has its extremes – large commercial venues for major touring acts, intimate clubs for late-night sets. What’s often missing is the middle ground, the spaces where emerging local bands can share a stage with established international artists, where a tropical cumbia night can transition into a family-friendly gathering. ZeyZey fills that gap. Named after the Arhuaco word for ‘happiness’ from Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the venue opened in 2023 as a place where different musical worlds converge. For Réplica, the brief was refreshingly open: create a fun, flexible identity that could work across genres and audiences. What emerged is a visual system rooted in Latin American graphic traditions – the kind of album covers and concert posters that founders Camilo Roa and Juan Pablo Mejía grew up seeing in Colombia. “We’re all from Colombia in the studio, but Camilo and I have been living in Europe for a while now. We both grew up listening to our parents’ records, so we carry a strong background in Latin American music,” Mejía shares. “This project became an excuse to dig back into the albums we’ve always loved. Discos Fuentes – a legendary Colombian label – was one of our biggest inspirations. We owe so much of our visual and musical culture to what we saw and heard growing up in Colombia. While doing our research, we began to notice recurring patterns in the covers: often a mix of typography, photography and colour limitations. That’s when we decided to take a similar approach for the graphic system – broad and flexible, but with specific choices tailored to each piece.” The identity operates on what Réplica calls a “principle of restriction” – using a limited set of resources per piece, much like the old typography and screen-printing workshops they reference. This wasn’t just a stylistic choice. Time constraints initially pushed the team toward working quickly with what they had, but the limitation evolved into a strategic approach that shapes every decision. “At first, it was a matter of time constraints – we had to deliver things quickly and develop the identity fast,” Mejía notes. “As the project progressed, we started thinking: what if we were working in an old-school screenprinting studio with a limited amount of resources and had to design with only what we had? It might sound romantic, but we like the idea of thinking analogically in such an overwhelmingly digital world. If you look at Discos Fuentes' records, they probably had a limited set of typographic options, yet they made the most of what they had – and it looks amazing.”