VISUAL IDENTITY FOR THE CIRCUS MUSEUM

The ISTD competition brief is to provide visual identity for a Circus Museum focusing on typography.

P. T. Barnum, Billy Smart’s, Chipperfield’s, Cirque du Soleil, The Moscow State Circus, The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, The Circus ot Dr. Lao, Freaks, Archaos, Carnivale...

Whether it’s the childhood delights of the circus coming to town, the sideshows and freak-shows, the performing animals, the trapeze artists, the (terrify-ing) clowns, the lion tamer, the ringmasters, the midway, the big top itself, or the darker side of Geek Love... the Circus pro-vokes a wealth of delights for all ages and temperaments.

This was one of the most fun researches as it allowed me to go to a circus. I went to see a performance at Moscow State Circus which came to London in November 2012.

I haven’t been to a circus since I was a kid so I did not remember the whole experience.

The surprising thing was that there were no animals, which I was expecting to see.

The experience was extremely colorful All the costumes, artifacts, lights, accessories - everything was in bright screaming colors.

All the typefaces used in cir-cuses are ornamental and full of details. Most of them come or draw inspiration from the 18th and 19th century display types. A lot of ornamental typefaces have shade which gives the impression of the letters being 3-dimensional.

Those are some of my experi-ments with simplifying therefore modernizing the heavy-in-orna-mentas typefaces.

My first idea when thinking about the typographic side of this brief is modernizing mu-seum’s typography. The decorative typefaces are associated with circus, but maybe there is another way of saying ‘circus’ without using ornamental letters?

Tracing different words and circuses names from old tradi-tional circus posters allowed me to study shapes and forms of the types used.

Even though all the old circus posters portray animals, they don’t perform in modern circuses.

Circle is one of the shapes repeatedly used in all the circus performances and circus posters or flyers.

One of the stores in Brixton Market is called Circus. But it wasn’t the name that drew my attention. I was really amazed and inspired by the use or paper rolls and card for decorating the outside of “Circus”.

This was the moment when I have realized this is the solu-tion I am looking for: circles + paper

My initial idea was to make a 3-dimen-

sional CIRCUS MUSEUM

logo made out of paper rolls.

When I thought about the 3D impres-

sion the traditional decorative fonts gave another idea came to

my mind. I decided to prototype

a logo made out of punched layers of

card.Every next layer

would have smaller size holes to empha-

size its 3-dimensional look.

When I made my prototype and was carrying it to school I have realized that my hole-punched logo works really great at a stencil for sunrays.

I got a positive feedback for the idea, but the technical aspects needed some improvement.

Holes in the first prototype I have made were cut using a circular cutter. Unfortunately this tool didn’t work very well in thick card. Another problem were sizes and shapes of the letters. I didn’t use any particular font - the text was drawn by hand - this had to be improved as well.

The next logo I made was cut using a wad punch - a specialist tool used for punching wood.

I was really afraid to use a wad punch to cut my holes becauseI have never used a tool like this before.

After making several punches I was really surprised how easy and fast this tool actually was.

When I was starting to make this logo for the Circus Musuem the vision I had was combining very raw material with something modern, bright.

In this case it would be raw card on the outside - bright aftificial LED lights inside.

This idea has changed a bit during the process of making my final piece. I realized I didn’t like the texture and look or the raw paper and it occured to me that this kind of material does not say ‘circus’ at all. This is when I decided to spray paint the whole piece white. The rawness would still be visible (neutral, plain color) but the grey, dirty color of card will dissapear.

The final outcome is a a frame with slides inside. The light box consists of 4 layers of text - each of them has a different hole size. The frame is separate so that layers can be taken out and their combination can be changed. There are two sets of LED lights in between the first and the second, and third and fourth layer.The idea was to focus on one shape that is associated with circus and use it in a very simple modern way.