Many thanks to the photographers Ishka Mishocka (page 1), Uggi Kaldan (page 2), Torsten Moebis (page 3), and Jonas Zadow (page 4) for the beautiful images.

This project is part of the common corporate design for two affiliate busisses, the Berlinesa dance studio and Trip2tango. Their corporate designs both have a common logo element (the “TANGO” lettering) and combine b/w ele ments with only one high light or back ground colour for a refined appear ance. They both share the same two font families — one fresh and human in a discreet way, the other more classical and musical — but still have distinct typographical styles: The travel product line has a lighter news paper style reminiscent of the fresh air you breeze at a beautiful new place and the pleas ant anticipation of the traveller setting out. The Berlinesa line in contrast is more per­sonal and profound picturing the depth of the tango experi­ence as well as the owner’s personal dedication to the studio and the dance.

last decade and suffered from a cluttered appearance with calendar dates, tiny photographs of locations and people, and location descriptions all mixed up.

Ksign tidied up the content presentation and gave the design a complete makeover including a re-designed logo, new colours and typography, and a new format that can be used either as fold brochure for letters or — unfold — as poster.

Playing with these seeming contradictions Ksign aimed at creating an elegant look with imaginative elements and a somewhat urban feel to it that emphasises his competence and well-composed style but still gives his explorative and imaginative features room.

The website runs on WordPress 3 and is multilingual.

Business cards were printed by Pinguin on 350g matte coated stock with UV spot varnish on both sides.

Partners

Daniela Kahle — naming

Perfectly printed on 300g FSC chromo board with full gloss varnish by Laserline.

Ksign retouched the massive amount of chrominance noise in the scanned analogue shots caused by scanner-film grain interference (yes, we’ll choose a different lab next time) and compensated for the difficult lightening conditions in some of the digital shots adding a little spark here and there.

Partners

Jonas Zadow — photography

Ksign has been helping the Bookshop team to improve their website since April 2010 when we won their competition on designonclick.com. Our initial task was to redesign and restructure their dated website, which had accumulated a myriad of nested subpages displaying ‘boxes’ of different sizes and differing content without a clear rationale. We did so with a clear and simple design that referenced both the product and the people behind it: The clear typographical structure with a strict baseline across columns reminds of books, whereas the warm fonts and the featured header photographs of the team and its shop give the site a personal touch in line with their business approach.

Later we developed a flexible information architecture for the entire website and a corresponding clearly arranged navigation menu that combines target-group-related links with necessary administrative and informational ones. Based on user survey results the latest revision of April 2011 focused on enhancing user interaction with the bookshop website (shop search and action bar under every book recommendation) and on further developing the minimalist design of the site.

The website version of January 2011 was shortlisted for the Hessian Web Award as one of the top 12 Hessian commercial websites out of 205 competitiors.

From the user survey 2011:

Well done! Your new website has been laid out clearly making it easy to navigate and to find information. The new positioning of your complete contact data and of the search function is very helpful — they caught my eye immediately. I also like the book recommendations with comments. The icing of the cake is your group photograph — it endears you to your audience and inspires trust. Unfortunately, I’m so enthusiastic about your new website that I don’t have any ideas for improvement. Well done!

Partners

taquiri — web development

This website aptly comprises everything you associate with dancing. — Steffen Kahles of our clients Kahles & Blaser

Ksign was consulted by the development team to create a metadata model that would meet academic quotation criteria, provide adequate search and filtering options, and could be analysed empirically. We also designed the web presences as requested in a very “minimalist and academic” way that respected the corporate identities of both organising parties.

Both platforms run on Drupal.