Various Logos

All logos have custom lettering, except Arnar & Ívar, Dalía, Thule, Funkþátturinn and Stockfish.

Logo for Hatari, collaboration with Ingi Kristján, based on his previous work. Ingi brought in the wonky newness, my bit was visually calculating calligraphic rules, simplifying, tweaking. This was an immensely gratifying collaboration, hope to do more.

Emiliana was a take-out Lasagne joint in downtown Reykjavík. Their special touch was striving to recreate the taste of the food of the Emilia-Romagna region of italy, rather than the bland recreation of italian food Icelanders are used to.

I studied a lot of photos of restaurant signage from the area. Take-aways were two: The signs were mostly hand-made, painted or cut. The letter-shapes were mostly Art Nouveau, Art Deco or similar styles from the period from the late 1800s to the first half of the 1900s.

To capture this vibe, I put aside all reference images before I started, and then I drew everything "manually", with pen on ipad. Just black color, eraser and the zoom feature, to get it as hand-made as possible. No copy-paste, just repetition by eye.

Many many rounds later I re-drew the shapes in with vector lines in illustrator.

Narfi of Skiltagerð Reykjavíkur then painted the logo on the windows of the restaurant, thus closing the circle.

Logo for Vogaklettur, a construction company. This was for a friend of mine. He owns three machines and takes on seasonal staff. What I decided to make was an identity for what I believe the company will become. So this is a logo for a medium-to-large construction company, made to scale up.

Logo for Snorri Restaurant. The restaurant is in Borgarnes, at a new getaway hotel that opened in 2018. I based it on Höfðaletur, the most significant visual design type unique to iceland. Höfðaletur was a style of letter that was carved into wood, on furniture.

Since Icelandic graphic- and type designers don't have much else of their own to work from, Höfðaletur is a well trod path by now. So I took the folds from Höfðaletur, and some of the decorations, and went in a different, more legible direction. While working on it, it made me think of the Höfðaletur interpretations of Stúdíó Kleina, and some of the tribal decorative designs by Siggi Odds. I did try to avoid hewing too close to either of their styles though.

This may become an alphabet one day, if the restaurant stops using the letter for their logo.

Logo proposal for Rauðhetta & Úlfurinn hair saloon. I was a regular there, and my hairdresser mentioned that they'd be doing new signage soon, so I sketched this up and pitched it on a whim. I'd had this visual idea in mind for a while, needed somewhere to put it. Stedelijk Museum's logo is the main inspiration.

Logo for the Iceland Bus System's student bus cards. For a while all students of the "menntaskóli" stage of education (16-20 yrs) got free bus passes, this was the logo on that card.

Iceland's longest running dance music radio show, and nightlife/music brand - Logo redraw based on original by Jökull Tómasson.

Iceland's premier music festival, and my first "megabrand". One of the longer stories I plan to tell in the long-form portfolio I'm planning.

Logo re-draw of Iceland's biggest Beer brand. Work done at Jónsson & Lemacks, with Albert Munoz.

Arty Bar in Reykjavik. I've done a lot of small and cultural things, since they call for cool and unique takes. They offer an oppurtunity to challenge yourself, and usually if the outcome is good, they will just take it as-is. Bigger and more corporate clients always have the need to tone things down and fit in with the visual landscape of their competitiors.

An early exploration of the intersection of three-dimensionality and the "translation" that the shape of calligraphic pens create.

Reykjavik night club. I didn't have the time or energy to make the logo I had in mind on deadline, so Halli Civelek offered to sit with me and draw it in ink. I specified "make it look like Inteview Magazine". It also really looks like Halli's figure illustrations.

Early work, lifestyle mag I co-founded in 2004. The name is mine, a direct translation of the english word "Vice". Yep. The outcome was closer to The Face though, with remnants of music mag Undirtónar, it's immediate predecessor, and some influences from Fókus, a youth-oriented newspaper-supplement magazine of the 90s.

I'm really proud of how good it was in parts. I had not learned to collaborate, so for the last issue I was the sole editor, I think, wrote or re-wrote most of it, designed all of it... and turned it in 2 weeks late to the printers.

At The Reykjavík Grapevine, things heat up if we're more than half an hour late sending to the printers.