M — N Associates turns Lôcô Art Market into ‘working factory’

Vietnam creative studio M — N Associates has created a new visual identity for Lôcô Art Market, turning the Ho Chi Minh City event into a playful ‘production line’ for local creativity.

The Summer 2026 edition marks the first time that Lôcô has operated as a collaborative platform rather than a standalone art market. Conceived as a gathering point for independent artists, local brands and young creatives, the event aims to connect local creators with audiences through exhibitions, commerce and community.

For Lôcô’s new identity, M — N Associates looked to the factory floor for inspiration. The studio describes the concept as a metaphor for the way creative work is assembled, refined and eventually delivered to an audience, with Lôcô positioned as the final point in that process.

The resulting identity borrows heavily from the visual language of logistics. Stacked cardboard boxes, packing tape, shipping labels, warehouse markings and industrial signage all feature prominently in the design. These elements are notably imperfect and irregular, reflecting the ‘organised chaos’ of a working factory while giving the identity a tactile quality.

This is most apparent in the Lôcô logo, whose letterforms tilt, overlap and shift in scale as if each character were an individual package moving along a production line. Rather than smoothing out those inconsistencies, the system makes them central to its character – creating what M — N calls “order within disorder”.

Typography provides the underlying structure, with Roboto Mono and VT323 forming the core of the system, and monospaced letterforms providing a consistent grid against which more unruly elements can move. Roboto Mono is adapted across different widths, heights, weights and slants, while Caveat is used sparingly as a handwritten ‘human mark’, mimicking the annotations found on a shipping label.

M — N also developed an internal Glyph Box Generator, enabling the design team to produce consistent typographic compositions while retaining the identity’s deliberately chaotic quality. The studio then translated the packaging concept into a modular set of physical and digital assets.

Cardboard textures provide a neutral base, while strips of high-visibility packing tape introduce brighter colours associated with logistics, safety and transportation. Labels, stickers and industrial signs double as navigational tools and opportunities for playful copywriting and local humour.

Across the event, these components were applied to everything from entrance markers and banners to booth signs, backdrops, social content and printed collateral. The idea was to not simply brand the market, but to make the event itself feel like an active, shared creative environment.

“Rather than operating as a standalone event,” M — N says of the Summer edition, “it was envisioned as a shared, community-built experience” – an approach that makes the factory metaphor particularly apt. In this case, the ‘production line’ isn’t spitting out products, but manufacturing connections between artists, brands and audiences.