Branding for Surveillance Music, a Porto based Drum and Bass label and promoter founded by the DJs and producers Fragz and Blast in 2019.
The main idea for the branding revolves around the Orwellian vibe of the label name itself, Surveillance, almost like a higher institution is watching you. Just like The Big Brother from Orwell’s 1984 book, Surveillance Music is always with an eye on new and disruptive Drum and Bass music, not to censor it like The Big Brother but instead show it to the world.
A custom-made industrial typeface was created for the Surveillance logotype, giving it a cold, heavy and brutalist feeling, enhanced by an always black-on-white or white-on-black color scheme. As the name Surveillance can be a little too big for some formats, we have decided it will be represented most of the times by its shorten version – SRVLNC. A logomark was also developed in addiction to the logotype, an eye with an embedded “S”, wich again invokes the Orwellian theme of the label name. To make the branding system the most flexible as possible, the logotype and the logomark can interact in many different ways allowing the brand to adapt to any necessary medium.
The covers
The albums covers were built on a rigid template grid system, so we can get a feeling of similarity across all Surveillance Music catalog, reinforced by the always all-caps use of the brand typeface – Object Sans. Alongside with the all black-on-white typographic grid based covers, all albums will have a distinct color on the album specifc graphic, so we can have just the right amount of uniqueness on each cover.
