With dancing rats and goats, Mauro Simeon crafts an intriguing brand for music label Stil vor Talent

Stil vor Talent is an independent techno music label based in Berlin with bags of experience – they have, after all, been around for 20 years. However, its branding – which included just a square logo with its name placed within the square at an angle – was a bit stuck in the past, unable to keep up with the digital world. So the label asked designer Mauro Simeon to help reimagine its identity. For Simeon, it was important to create a fully-fledged brand, which surpassed just a logo, to help the label express itself efficiently. “We switched the brand from a logo brand to a more complex brand system with more elements and more flexibility,” Simeon tells us. The work, though, started with the logo. Simeon got rid of the square and instead placed the wordmark within a circle (a vinyl record) to create the refreshed logo. “Having seen the old logo, I had to think about how to tweak it to give the whole thing a new meaning and transform it into something more modern and appealing to a younger target group. I had the idea to transform it to the label of a vinyl record and that’s the basic thought behind the branding,” he says. The logo is ultimately quite simple, and that’s what allows it to live across the brand quite effortlessly. Simeon picked Bossa by Family Type to set the wordmark. “I landed at Bossa because it feels strong and self-confident and has character, while still not feeling distant and arrogant (which was really important to me and the team at Stil vor Talent),” he explains. He paired it with KH Teka by Kurppa Hosk Type whose neutrality allowed for more space for Bossa’s expressiveness to shine.