abdz—do - Thoughts on design, inspiration, UX career

Bonetti Kozerski Studio New York: Inside Their Chinatown Loft

alex — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:48:27 +0000

Bonetti Kozerski Studio New York: Inside Their Chinatown Loft alex April 06, 2026

The Bonetti Kozerski studio New York just relocated to Chinatown, designing their own HQ as a 23-meter loft where the Manhattan Bridge frames their work.

After 23 years working from the same SoHo building, Enrico Bonetti and Dominic Kozerski moved deliberately to Canal Street. The duo, known for interiors that balance restraint with warmth, treated their new headquarters like any other commission: a design problem with a specific brief, a defined budget, and a client with strong opinions. In this case, the client was themselves.

The result reads as a portfolio argument in built form. A 23-meter open floor plan runs the width of the building, its south wall a continuous band of floor-to-ceiling windows framing the Manhattan Bridge approach. A matte-black exposed-beam ceiling meets white epoxy resin floors, keeping the space grounded without losing the light. Custom walnut work tables run through the center. Metal shelving units stretch 12 meters along the walls, stacked with books and vintage objects accumulated over decades.

Inside the Bonetti Kozerski Studio New York

A wall of vintage speakers doubles as acoustic treatment and a material statement: the studio is as interested in what surrounds the work as in the work itself. The entry features a teak console, a marble table, and an oak bench beside paintings and a large city map. Vitra furniture fills the conference area, alongside cement-bonded particle boards sourced from Portugal.

Bonetti and Kozerski documented the project for Wallpaper* magazine in March 2026. The Chinatown HQ is a working studio, a material library, and a clear argument for what happens when the architect controls every decision.

Bar Branding Identity for Pavilhão, Rio de Janeiro

abduzeedo — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:17:00 +0000

Bar Branding Identity for Pavilhão, Rio de Janeiro abduzeedo April 06, 2026

Pavilhão bar branding identity by Gabriel Soulza blends Art Déco geometry with samba school colors to honor the culture and soul of Lapa, Rio de Janeiro.

Pavilhão is a bar in Lapa, Rio de Janeiro's most storied bohemian district. The neighborhood sits on a layered urban ground: Art Déco buildings line the streets, rodas de samba gather outside, and venues like Circo Voador have shaped a generation of musicians. When designer Gabriel Soulza took on the commission to develop a full bar branding identity for Pavilhão, the challenge was not just to make a logo — it was to translate all of that cultural weight into something legible, durable, and honest.

The brief covered two locations: Pavilhão Lapa and Pavilhão Botafogo. Both venues orbit three pillars — bar, culture, and gastronomy. The bar branding identity had to carry all three without collapsing into cliché. Rio de Janeiro's visual history runs deep and fast toward stereotype. Soulza's solution was to anchor the work in the building's own architecture: the Art Déco structure of the Lapa venue became the formal starting point for the logo and lettering.

A Bar Branding Identity Rooted in Place and History

The logotype draws from Art Déco geometry — angular, structured, set with a controlled weight that holds across scales. On a bottle cap, on a menu, on a staff uniform, it reads clearly. The color palette is borrowed directly from a traditional escola de samba, the samba schools that march through Rio every Carnival. These are not arbitrary cultural references. Samba schools each have a registered palette — bold combinations of primary and secondary colors that carry meaning and identity across the city. Using those colors inside a bar branding identity system grounds Pavilhão in Rio's living culture rather than in a nostalgic postcard version of it.

Beyond the logo, Soulza developed a full suite of brand applications: custom illustrations, menu design, and uniform graphics. The illustrations draw from the same visual language as the logo — geometric, flat, confident in silhouette. They reference the types of people and scenes that pass through Lapa: musicians, partygoers, the street itself. On the menu, the typography sets a clean hierarchy without competing with the illustrative elements. The uniform graphics bring the bar branding identity into the physical space, making staff part of the visual system rather than an afterthought.

The result is a coherent bar branding identity that reads as local without performing locality. It does not try to be vintage, nor does it reach for a modernist neutral. It holds its ground between the Art Déco past and the living present of the neighborhood. Gabriel Soulza's portfolio is at behance.net/gabrielsoulza and shows a consistent ability to build identity systems from place-based research rather than from visual trend cycles.

Kokkōpi: Bold Coffee Branding by Impro Studio

abduzeedo — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:12:00 +0000

Kokkōpi: Bold Coffee Branding by Impro Studio abduzeedo April 06, 2026

Impro Studio built coffee branding for Kokkōpi around a caffeinated rooster, tilted letterforms, and loud primary colors that absolutely refuse to blend.

There is a design philosophy buried inside the name Kokkōpi. It pulls from kokekokkō — the Japanese rooster's crow — and mixes it with kopi, the Indonesian word for coffee. The result is a brand name that already sounds like it has too much energy. Impro Studio, a Jakarta-based creative team, ran with that energy and built an entire coffee branding system around it.

The project was published in August 2025 and became one of Behance's most-appreciated branding features of that season, collecting over 7,500 appreciations. The team behind it included a creative director, art director, graphic designer, illustrator, 3D specialist, motion designer, and project manager — seven people building one loud coffee brand. That scale shows in the work.

Coffee Branding That Wears Its Personality Loud

The logotype is the first thing that signals intent. Each letterform in "Kokkōpi" sits at a slightly different angle, as though the letters themselves have had too many espressos. It is not careless. It is deliberate — a coffee branding decision that communicates personality before the brand says a single word. The tilt is consistent enough to feel systematic, loose enough to feel alive.

The rooster mascot follows the same logic. Illustrator Adrian Baihaqi drew a character that is rough where it could be clean, energetic where it could be still. The linework carries a deliberate irregularity — not the kind that comes from lack of skill, but the kind that comes from knowing exactly when to pull back. The mascot reads as a caffeine-powered anomaly, which is exactly the brief the team describes in their project notes.

Color plays the third major role in this coffee branding identity. The palette runs on bold reds, deep blacks, and warm yellows — loud primaries with high contrast and no apologies. There are no muted tones, no soft gradients to soften the brand's edges. The packaging mockups — cups, bags, and branded materials — show how the palette holds its charge even at small sizes and across different materials.

How the System Holds Together

What makes this coffee branding work as a system is the internal consistency across its most different elements. The tilted type, the rough mascot, the loud palette — these three things could easily clash if they were pulling in different directions. They do not. They share an energy level. They were each designed to feel like they came from the same place: a brand that is small, caffeinated, and not interested in being refined.

The Kokkōpi identity was created by Impro Studio for the brand itself, which positions as a coffee label built for people who want their mornings loud. The branding reflects that brief without overexplaining it. Ganang Cakra served as creative director, Luthfi Muhammad Latif as art director, with the full team — including motion and 3D work — rounding out an identity that moves as well as it sits still. The full project is on Behance at Impro Studio's profile.

Animating 160,000 Cubes: A Three.js Dithering Visualization

jeff — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:56:34 +0000

Animating 160,000 Cubes: A Three.js Dithering Visualization jeff April 05, 2026

Developer Damar Aji Pramudita's Three.js dithering visualization renders 160,000 GPU-instanced cubes animated via GLSL shaders to decode halftone images.

Dithering is a technique older than digital computing itself, used in print and early displays to simulate tonal gradients with limited color palettes. Pramudita's project lifts that analog concept into the browser, mapping any photograph to a 400x400 grid of 160,000 independent cube instances. Each cube receives a brightness value sampled from the source image, then animates along its z-axis in response to that value, creating a three-dimensional halftone effect that breathes with the underlying image.

The performance behind this effect depends entirely on Three.js InstancedMesh, which sends all 160,000 transformation matrices to the GPU in a single draw call. Per-cube delay factors, scale targets, and position offsets are calculated inside a GLSL vertex shader, keeping JavaScript out of the animation loop entirely. The result is a smooth, real-time render that would grind to a halt if each cube were updated individually in JavaScript.

How Three.js Dithering Visualization Works

Pramudita published a detailed 10-step tutorial on Codrops covering the full implementation, from geometry setup and texture sampling through threshold mapping and animation via shader uniforms. The Three.js dithering visualization doubles as a generative art primer, showing how a structured algorithm can produce outputs that feel organic and alive. Custom GLSL fragment shaders read normalized cell indices and compare sampled luminance against a threshold matrix, toggling cube visibility to recreate the halftone grid at any resolution.

The demo, full source code, and a step-by-step walkthrough are available on Codrops. Source: Animating 160,000 Cubes in Three.js to Visualize Dithering by Damar Aji Pramudita.

Best Design of the Week: Firefox, Corn, and Type

abduzeedo — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:15:50 +0000

Best Design of the Week: Firefox, Corn, and Type abduzeedo April 05, 2026

Five projects define the best design of the week: a Firefox fox mascot, corn architecture, radical restraint, custom type, and a shape-shifting masthead.

The thread connecting all five pieces this week is conviction. Each project made a decisive choice and committed fully, without hedging. That kind of clarity is rare, and it shows in the work.

JKR's rebrand of Firefox, titled "More Fire. More Fox," introduces Kit, a fox and red panda hybrid mascot illustrated by Marco Palmieri. The campaign draws a clear line: every element is explicitly human-made, with no AI involved. Firefox is betting that craft and intentionality will resonate with an audience growing skeptical of generated outputs.

The Best Design of the Week Across Five Disciplines

Manufactura took an equally radical stance with CORNCRETL, a structural architectural material made from corn waste and lime, printed by a KUKA robotic arm into load-bearing forms. The project treats agricultural byproduct as a legitimate building material, not a novelty.

Malvah Studio in Cape Town, named Awwwards Studio of the Year 2025, built its identity around radical restraint. The studio's WebGL-powered site and work philosophy are defined by what it refuses to do as much as what it builds.

Studio Mut's identity for Caffe Nazionale in Arzignano, Veneto commissioned a custom handwriting typeface from Stefan Marx and Dinamo, paired with a wobbly griffin that refuses to be polished. Licensing an existing font was never on the table.

The Fence Magazine closes the week with a masthead by Adrien Vasquez of the Abyme foundry that changes typeface with every issue. Consistency, by choice, is not on the table.

Dash Brand Identity Mockups by Justin Hartley

sofia — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:00:00 +0000

Dash Brand Identity Mockups by Justin Hartley sofia April 04, 2026

Justin Hartley's Dash brand identity mockups use warm oak textures and cool gray stationery to build a precise and quietly confident visual identity set.

Designer Justin Hartley shared a detailed set of brand identity mockups on Behance, built around the Dash system by Mockup Cloud. The project presents a minimal visual identity through careful material choices: warm oak wood slat panels, cool silver-gray card stock, and reeded acrylic sheets. Each surface reinforces the brand's restraint. Nothing is decorative for its own sake.

The palette stays narrow: off-white, mid-gray, and raw wood tones. A single orange leather corner clip on the folder breaks the monochrome. It is the kind of decision that separates competent branding from confident branding. The dot grid texture printed across each stationery piece adds structure without clutter.

What Makes These Brand Identity Mockups Work

The Dash logotype appears as both wordmark and pattern. Letterhead and envelopes show oversized cropped letterforms bleeding off the edge. This turns the brand name into a textural element. Business cards photograph against copper grid tiles and reflective acrylic, showing how the identity holds across matte and reflective surfaces.

The open book spread reveals the template system in full. Bold editorial typography sits on one page, a muted portrait on the other. This contrast shows how the brand identity mockups stay consistent from stationery to editorial print. The flatlay with pen, paper clip, and wood block details closes the presentation with material warmth. Justin Hartley's brand identity mockups make a case for restraint as a design strategy.

CORNCRETL: Robotic 3D Printed Construction from Corn Waste

kai — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 10:30:47 +0000

CORNCRETL: Robotic 3D Printed Construction from Corn Waste kai April 04, 2026

CORNCRETL by MANUFACTURA blends corn waste and lime aggregates into a mix for robotic 3D printed construction that reduces carbon emissions by up to 70%.

Mexico-based design practice MANUFACTURA developed CORNCRETL as a response to one of the construction industry's core problems: high carbon output and low material efficiency. The material combines corn residues, recycled nejayote — the calcium-rich wastewater from corn nixtamalization — and lime-based mineral aggregates into a printable composite for robotic 3D printed construction workflows.

The research draws from pre-Hispanic building traditions. In Mayan culture, lime mixtures known as Sak-Kaab provided breathable, self-healing wall systems that required lower calcination temperatures than Portland cement. CORNCRETL reactivates this logic through contemporary fabrication. The mineral base uses Geocalce T, a formulation of natural hydraulic lime (NHL 3.5), dolomitic limestone, river silica sand, and Carrara marble powder, bridging Mexican agricultural byproducts with Italian mineral materials.

Robotic 3D Printed Construction with Corn-Lime Composites

Fabrication tests were conducted during the WASP Residency 2025 in Massa Lombarda, Italy. The team used a WASP Concrete HD Continuous Feeding System mounted to a KUKA robotic arm to extrude the corn-lime mixture in successive layers. Three prototype wall panels were printed at scales from 40 cm to 80 cm in height and cured at room temperature for two to three days. The curved geometries reference terrazzo patterns from Rimini, demonstrating that the robotic 3D printed construction method can hold non-rectilinear forms with sharp surface definition.

Additive manufacturing eliminates formwork entirely, cutting material waste by up to 90 percent. Compressive strength tests confirmed the panels as components for lightweight, low-cost housing. CORNCRETL positions robotic 3D printed construction as a scalable alternative for markets where corn agriculture and unsustainable building practices intersect, converting food waste into load-bearing wall material.

Baillat Studio Brand Identity for The Cortège Uses Only Type

jeff — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 02:43:43 +0000

Baillat Studio Brand Identity for The Cortège Uses Only Type jeff April 03, 2026

Baillat Studio brand identity for The Cortège is a case study in using pure typography to launch an immersive event campaign with no photography at all.

The brief that arrived at Montreal-based Baillat Studio contained a structural problem: build a complete visual campaign for a live ceremonial event with no photography, no footage, no concrete imagery from the show itself. The Cortège is a wordless outdoor procession unfolding at dusk across Los Angeles, drawing from medieval morality plays, pagan seasonal festivals, and shamanic trance. The experience frames itself as a festive funeral for a culture losing its shared rituals. Designers had to conjure atmosphere from scratch, with type as the only tool.

Graphic Designer Leon Lo describes the approach as working with duality and transcendence, evoking tradition inside a contemporary frame. The palette cycles between dark muted earth and bright vibrant moments, echoing transitional sky light and the land the procession crosses.

How Baillat Studio brand identity built ritual through type alone

Rector by Production Type handles all titling in capitals, its tall proportions lending classical authority while razor-sharp serifs provide contemporary edge. FT Kunst Grotesk by Formula Type carries supporting text, its modern structure holding historical echoes. A custom symbol system layers on top: some marks read immediately, others stay oblique. That opacity reinforces a sense of initiation mirroring the experience itself.

The campaign launched with no tangible assets from the show. Baillat built intrigue through abstract means, releasing concrete imagery only as it became available. Executive Director Isobel Macondray describes the brief as needing to signal sacredness while remaining open to all who feel called. That tension between enigmatic and accessible defines every decision in this Baillat Studio identity.

shadcn/studio: AI Tools for shadcn UI Components

prya — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:04:05 +0000

shadcn/studio: AI Tools for shadcn UI Components prya April 03, 2026

shadcn/studio is a design toolkit for building shadcn UI components faster, with an AI theme builder, 700+ copy-paste blocks, and a Figma-to-code plugin.

For designers and developers working in React, shadcn UI components have become a standard building block. The shadcn distribution system lets teams own their code entirely. shadcn/studio adds a visual layer on top. Builders can move faster without hand-coding every Tailwind class.

The toolkit ships with over 700 free and pro blocks. These cover dashboards, marketing pages, e-commerce layouts, and SaaS interfaces. Each block is copy-paste ready or installable via the CLI. The card grid, data tables, hero sections, and auth flows make it easy to scan the library. All entries install as clean shadcn UI components with full code ownership and zero vendor lock-in.

AI Theme Builder for shadcn UI Components

The standout feature is the AI theme builder, powered by Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Designers describe a visual style in plain text. The tool generates a complete theme with light and dark mode tokens in seconds. The demo shows a manga-inspired palette request, delivering high-contrast blacks, crisp whites, and sharp shadow values. Tokens cover backgrounds, foregrounds, popovers, cards, and destructive states.

Beyond theming, shadcn/studio connects to an MCP server that integrates directly into IDEs like Cursor. This lets AI agents generate shadcn UI components and full page blocks from the premium library. A Figma-to-code plugin converts Figma frames into clean component code. The Copy Prompt feature sends any block to v0, Bolt, or Lovable for further iteration.

Google Sans Flex Free Font: Six Variable Axes, One File

marcus — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:58:25 +0000

Google Sans Flex Free Font: Six Variable Axes, One File marcus April 03, 2026

Google Sans Flex free font: Google's own brand typeface is now free and open under OFL, rebuilt by David Berlow with six axes including a rare roundness.

Google has used Google Sans Flex across Search, Maps, Gmail, and Pixel devices for years. The typeface carries a clean geometric foundation that works at every scale, from interface text to display headlines. What makes it stand apart from other variable sans-serifs is the depth of its design range. Font Bureau's David Berlow rebuilt it with six axes: weight, width, optical size, grade, slant, and roundness. Each axis operates independently, and a single file replaces what once required dozens of separate static weights and styles.

Download Google Sans Flex Free Font: Six Axes, Unlimited Range

The roundness axis is the standout feature. It shifts letterforms from crisp and geometric to softly rounded without touching weight or width. That kind of precise, isolated control is rare in variable fonts, and it makes Google Sans Flex adaptable far beyond brand contexts. The typeface scales from smartwatch UI to billboard typography without losing legibility. Designers can grab it directly from Google Fonts, install it via npm through Fontsource, or add it to a Figma project in seconds. The license is SIL Open Font License 1.1, free for commercial and personal use.

The broader story here matters. Google's in-house typographic system, powering a vast product ecosystem, is now a shared resource. Designers working on UI products, editorial layouts, or brand systems should download Google Sans Flex free font today. One variable file covers it all, at no cost, under a license that allows commercial work without attribution.

Google Sans Flex in use across Pixel devices