CLIENT
Strange Luck
year
2025
role
Creative Direction, Brand Identity, Web Build
Strange Luck is a production and storytelling studio that works with brands, nonprofits, and media companies on documentary and narrative projects. They come from a filmmaking background — their approach is humanistic, their work is primarily video, and the stories they tell are built around empathy rather than spectacle. They needed a visual identity that matched that sensibility while also making them memorable in a crowded market of production studios that tend to look either aggressively corporate or aggressively minimal. When I came onto the project, one of the founders had started sketching in a direction that drew from 80s psychic and tarot imagery — occult typography, layered textures, something strange and atmospheric. That instinct was right. My job was to take it somewhere more specific and more ownable.
Alternate Logo Version developed early in the process
Early direction and inspiration
I kept the strangeness but grounded it differently. The 80s reference stayed, but I shifted the specific register away from tarot and toward VHS, which made more sense for a studio whose primary medium is video. VHS carries its own kind of nostalgia and texture, and it pointed toward the work rather than just toward an aesthetic. The otherworldly quality the founders wanted was still there, but it came from the feeling of something slightly out of time, slightly off-frequency, rather than from occult symbols. The logo went through more iterations than almost anything else I've worked on. The defining decision was the treatment of the word 'Strange' — unusual proportions, distorted width — which gives it the quality of something that doesn't quite fit the frame it's in. That discomfort is intentional. It's strange in the way the studio's work is strange: familiar subject matter rendered in a way that makes you look again.
The final identity system runs across the logo, a style guide, and a custom-built website. The site's function is to showcase Strange Luck's work and to use the pointed style to accent it. The visual language does that through restraint punctuated by moments of strangeness: a typeface choice that feels slightly wrong, a layout that holds more tension than a standard portfolio grid, texture that suggests age and materiality without becoming purely decorative. For a studio built on narrative and human connection, the brand needed to feel like it was made by people, not by a brand consultant. That meant keeping imperfection in the system — not as sloppiness, but as evidence of sensibility. Strange Luck's clients hire them because they trust their taste. The brand needs to communicate that taste is present before the first conversation happens.