Studio Gruhl’s identity for techno label Spellbound is really a canvas primed to grow and change

When Studio Gruhl was invited to design the identity for the young female-led techno label Spellbound, they realised they had a lot of room to play. As Creative Director Malte Gruhl puts it, younger brands are always fun to work with; there are fewer corporate hoops to jump through and there’s also an appetite for bending the traditional rules of branding, allowing designers to crack something truly unique and fresh. And that’s exactly how things turned out for Studio Gruhl and Spellbound – the final identity is chockablock with character; it asks for your attention and stamps its presence. “What we did for Spellbound was create a kind of canvas – an underlying grid that, together with the colour palette, typeface, and logo, can work by itself or extend with 2D and 3D illustrations for stills and motion assets. A bit like a volume scale – Spellbound can turn up the volume by adding more and more elements on the canvas or be more restrained and direct if needed,” says Gruhl. The studio achieved this by creating an underlying framework which they then treated as a base for a collage, overlaying 2D shapes, cut-outs swathed in gradients and rugged 3D forms. A lot of this was inspired by the early techno scenes in Berlin from the 1990s. “It was key for us to represent DJ Shaleen’s vinyl-only sets. We did this by going back in time to when this was the standard in the early days of Berlin techno,” Gruhl tells us. “From this, we took our visual cues – whether it’s raw, brutal 3D elements inspired by digital art and VJ sets before the internet, or a slightly off-colour palette, everything traces back to the ’90s when techno played in abandoned houses or empty factory buildings.”