Studio Blunt creates a brand that moves with poet Haidar Ansari

Studio Blunt began the project with an uncomfortable question: Do artists even need visual identities? The Stavanger-based studio had been asked to create branding for Haidar Ansari, a Danish poet whose work moves between classes, cultures and politics with a restlessness that resists containment. His practice exists in constant tension – privilege against struggle, chaos against structure, representation against exclusion. Any attempt to fix that complexity into a coherent brand risked making it feel corporate, too designed, inauthentic. The design process, however, started conventionally enough. Studio Blunt explored multiple routes, sketching marks, systems and shapes, searching for balance between something evocative and something strategic. But with each iteration, Founder & Designer Bernt Henrik Kommedal recognised a fundamental problem. “Every option risked feeling too defined,” he explains. “That’s when we decided the identity should be everything and nothing.” This philosophical shift redirected the entire approach. Rather than creating a logo that would sit across Ansari’s work as a permanent stamp, Studio Blunt built what they describe as a stripped-back frame – a structure flexible enough to hold whatever comes next without imposing itself. The solution acknowledges that visual systems, however thoughtfully constructed, can constrain as much as they enable. “Design systems can sometimes become handcuffs,” Kommedal notes, “so the most honest thing we could do was build one that can get out of the way.” The identity centres on a typographic treatment where Ansari’s name becomes both logo and framework. Built around Studio6 by Playtype, the wordmark can fill an entire frame or contract to create space for content. This shifting scale translates the dualities that define Ansari’s practice: minimalism and chaos, exclusivity and access, the bourgeois and the underclass. The name functions as architecture, expanding and contracting across applications whilst maintaining structural consistency. Selecting the typeface required finding something that could hold complexity without feeling clinical. Studio6 carries small quirks and subtle personality that prevent it from feeling sterile. “It’s in that sweet spot between human and systematic,” Kommedal shares. Beyond its technical qualities, the typeface connects the identity to Ansari’s local context through its Copenhagen origins, creating geographic grounding without relying on literal visual references.