Curve Club
‘Physical meets digital’
We helped create a brand identity for a new Shoreditch private members club that unites physical and digital in tech’s most ‘romantic’ sense.
Curve Club is the only private members club exclusive to founders. Founded by a fully female team including our CEO Rosie Dallas, who by 30 had cofounded 4 successful businesses, 2 of which have sold in the tens of millions (one being Fat Llama acq $40m in 2022). She and her cofounders are passionate about building community and finding innovations in every field.
Our brief for the branding was centred on the idea ‘physical meets digital’. The club itself marries these two worlds through things like NFT artworks and a members-only community-based app, and the look and feel had to also straddle both spaces. The club is billed as a “luxurious clubhouse for people busy turning their dreams into reality,” a nod to the blurring of different worlds: digital and physical; dream-like and reality.
Branding in three dimensions
We started out by looking into things like computer games, where digital worlds were informed by physical sites (and vice versa). We looked at various nostalgic and romantic territories for inspiration. The final branding was mostly informed by references from Modernist 3D art, digital sculptures, 3D still-lifes and digital architecture, inspired by the work of CG artist Fernando Gasperin.
And these designs play into the club’s interior design. Elements of the logo, for instance, have become sculptural forms based on the 3D renders that can be accessed digitally.
Our aim was to build a really fun render in which a user could scroll through a doorway into the digital club. Once through the doorway, lots of 3D shapes merge together into the Curve Club logo, which stand front and centre. In this way, the identity really captures the essence of the fluidity of concept, and the merging of both worlds.
Organic, futuristic, nostalgic
The all-uppercase Curve Club logo uses a lightly customised version of Taklobo Display by French font foundry Blaze Type, chosen for the way its letterforms resemble a moving, living, dynamic thing. It also perfectly encapsulates the timeless nature of Curve Club – futuristic, yet nostalgic. The logo also appears in animated forms to further bring the brand and its curves to life.
Headline and body copy uses Futura Std Light – chosen for its clean, legible lines – as a foil to the more decadent type of the logo mark. Futura also evokes a retro modernism which we felt worked well for Curve Club’s tone and personality.
The space itself is designed around tactility, dialling up elements that look to evoke nature’s own curves and lines. As such, the Curve Club brand colours use gradient pairings of eight different shades of green; pink; purple and blue chosen for their nods to more natural organic tones.
The paler pink, stone-like tones are the primary brand colours: they look to bring the ‘outside in’ for the physical space and help deliver the Curve Club experience. The dark blues and burgundy are used to punctuate the palette but avoid classic ‘tech’ tropes: the colours are more in line with a hotel or high-end hospitality than a modern-day start-up.
Blending two worlds
Arched door-like shapes are central to the branding across two and three dimensions; referencing the idea of entering a distinct Curve Club portal whether online or in person. Brand photography was selected to further amp up that idea of otherworldly or dreamlike states.
The photography looks to blend digital art and reality, offering a sense of escapism and somewhere new, unspoiled, and not-yet experienced, since Curve Club is a new breed of clubhouse – something that blends two worlds to become something entirely different.
It was great to work on an identity that balances art and design but which is still playful in spirit. The client was genuinely looking to do something different, and which looks to the future – something ahead of the curve.
Curve Club in Shoreditch is now open and accepting applications, its Soho branch will launch later in 2023.
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