The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Studio Cera is an interior architecture practice grounded in cultural and historical references. It shapes each interior through association, memory and context – an approach it sums up as “interiors shaped by story.” To translate that thinking into an identity, the practice turned to Paris-based Ofform Studio, whose portfolio spans furniture, interiors and collectable design. “From the very beginning, this was my main brief,” explains Anastasia Mira, Founder of Studio Cera, who wanted “a visual language that would authentically represent both Studio Cera as a brand and the projects we create.”

Rather than quoting any of the cultural and historical references directly, Ofform Studio designed the identity to mirror how Studio Cera arrives at them. “We did not translate these references literally or borrow specific historical motifs,” Anastasia Kholdenko, Co-founder & Creative Director, tells us. Instead, they appear “through the way imagery is selected, combined and sequenced across the system,” while “the typography and architectural lines provide a more controlled framework around them.” The aim was to reflect the practice’s own method: “gathering fragments from different places and periods,” as Kholdenko puts it, “then bringing them together into a new narrative.”

The studio used Dinamo’s ABC Arizona Flare throughout the identity, a typeface that sits, as Kholdenko describes it, “somewhere between a serif and a sans serif.” It offered “the clarity and structure we wanted for an architectural practice, but also a certain historical and human quality that supports Studio Cera’s more narrative approach,” she details. For Kholdenko, timelessness “was not about making the identity neutral or simply avoiding anything trendy”; it “came from working with historical references and then refining them into something softer, more human and more specific to Studio Cera.”

The logotype is also built from Arizona Flare, though not without customisation. Ofform Studio redrew several letterforms “to give it a more distinctive and personal character,” Kholdenko explains, reconstructing the ‘R’ with a straighter construction and a softer, rounded finish. For her part, Mira had asked Ofform Studio to avoid “something standardised or overly generic, too expected from the interior architecture studio,” and equally to keep it from leaning “too heavily into what is fashionable or trend-driven at this particular moment” – “trends inevitably fade,” she reasons, “whereas my goal was to create an identity that would remain relevant and serve the brand for many years to come.”

Presented with several concepts, Mira chose the one that “brought together everything I had been looking for,” not least because it suited a practice where “every project we create is unique, regardless of its scale, and I wanted that idea to be reflected in the logo.” “To me,” she adds, “this logo exists between the past and the present – just like our interiors.”

The identity also includes a second, pictorial mark: a running archer. Mira proposed it as it is “one of the oldest archetypes in world culture and mythology,” one that she says resonates with the studio’s narrative approach and symbolises “purpose, inner strength, dynamism and the pursuit of ideals.” The running figure introduces movement and keeps the mark from feeling static or heraldic. For Ofform Studio, it is that meeting of “structure, history and personal symbolism” that gives the identity its sense of permanence.

Ofform Studio also designed and developed Studio Cera’s website as a direct continuation of the identity and its narrative approach. Each project appears there not only through its finished interiors but through the references and inspirations behind it, showing where a project began and how its atmosphere took shape. “Digital allowed us to unfold this more gradually through scrolling, sequencing and the relationship between images, references and text,” Kholdenko explains. “Rather than simply presenting a portfolio, the website lets each project develop as a story.”

“What could not translate was the physical experience of the interiors themselves: scale, light, material and movement,” Kholdenko reflects. “The identity frames that narrative rather than trying to imitate it.”