Classmate Studio reworks the identity for Helsinki restaurant Elm — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Elm is a restaurant on the edge of Kaivopuisto park in South Helsinki, run by chefs Carlos Henriques, Albert Franch Sunyer and Luka Balac, who are also behind the restaurants Nolla and Nolita. It serves lunch and dinner through the week, with cooking guided by the seasons and inspired by the chefs’ Mediterranean roots. The kitchen works without cling film and cleans with ozonated water and soap made from recycled kitchen oil. Elm occupies the first floor of a villa dating back to 1880, within Puistokatu 4 – a Space for Science and Hope, which is used for research, collaboration and events.

Helsinki and Budapest-based Classmate Studio was commissioned to rework Elm’s identity. “We wanted the brand to sit naturally alongside its surroundings. Something that feels warm, analogue and hand-crafted,” explains Emma Ranne, who handles media direction and brand management at Elm. “We wanted to keep a hand-drawn logo and the illustration by Linda Linko, which have been part of Elm since day one, but we were open to rethinking their role within the brand.” Linda Linko is a Finnish artist, and the illustration is her painting, which hangs in the dining room.

Each of the chefs’ restaurants has a character of its own, and the building is a source of inspiration for Elm’s. Once home to the actress Ida Aalberg, later a school and, for decades, the Museum of Finnish Architecture, the wooden villa has been carefully restored and furnished mostly with vintage and second-hand pieces. “A restaurant’s physical surroundings play a big part in its personality, and this is something we wanted to leave plenty of room for,” notes Elm’s Chef & Co-founder Carlos Henriques. “The rooms already have a lot going on, with ornate ceilings, paintings, tall windows and views over Kaivopuisto park, so the identity had to settle into that rather than compete with it,” details Classmate Studio’s Art Director & Co-founder József G. Kiss.

“Blue came in as the connecting element between the brand’s Mediterranean and Nordic roots,” Kiss tells us. “The sea is also a common denominator, if you will. The owners’ roots go back to the Mediterranean, the restaurant sits not far from the Baltic in Helsinki, and seafood plays a seasonal part on the menu too.” Blue appears across print, signage in the rooms, the website and social media. “Using a single blue throughout, with no tints or secondary colours, lets the variety come from texture instead,” he adds.

The previous identity had already used Linko’s painting as a kind of symbol. “We looked at how she paints, with fast, confident gestures, and created a new set of brush strokes based on that. They run across the identity and bring out the flamboyant Mediterranean spirit, while the minimal gestures still reflect Linda’s clearly Nordic roots,” Kiss explains. The studio edited many hand-painted versions of the word ‘elm’ into a family of marks that can be scaled and repeated across the layouts. “So instead of a single fixed logomark, the brand has a set of versatile, handmade letterings that can evolve over time.”

The cyanotypes that sit alongside the brush strokes come from an old photographic process that prints in blue. The studio made them by hand, brushing the light-sensitive solution onto paper, arranging each composition directly on the sheet, exposing it to sunlight and washing the finished print in water. “That process, together with the carefully composed arrangements of cutlery, glassware and pure ingredients, connects directly to the restaurant’s ethos: selected, quality ingredients, Mediterranean roots, high-end craft and analytical Nordic thinking,” Kiss notes. “We favoured objects with strong silhouettes and some transparency, because glass and sliced citrus let light through, creating layered tones that reveal details we wouldn’t otherwise see.”

Underneath the brush strokes and the cyanotypes, the identity is built on a grid. The body text and some of the distinctive titles are set in ABC Laica Mono, from Dinamo, with Baraquiel for the headlines. “We wanted a pairing that feels calm and classic, with a touch of experimental expression coming from the carefully used Baraquiel font,” Kiss explains. “For hero words such as À la carte, Welcome and Menu, we set bespoke all-caps compositions in Laica, generously letterspaced to subtly reference classical Latin stone-carved alphabets.” The name itself is used sparingly and placed loosely over that grid, a second and more flamboyant layer. “The graphics are restrained on purpose: mostly blue and warm white, with plenty of space,” Kiss adds. “In the rooms themselves, we let the space breathe, with the identity appearing only in the details, such as the menus, gift cards, window graphics and the signs outside.”

“Our vision for the website was a collage-like setup,” Ranne details. “We take a lot of photos for social media, and liked the idea of a layout that would work well with vertical photos and clips taken on a phone. We also liked the idea of assets being multifunctional wherever possible, both because it’s practical for time and resource reasons but also because it creates a nice link between the physical restaurant and its online presence. For example, our online menus double as the printed menus in the restaurant.” Viewing the menu, checking the opening hours and booking a table were the priorities, and the whole site was thought through mobile-first. “We’ve had many compliments on the website as well as the refreshed edition of our brand,” Ranne notes.

Classmate Studio designed the site on the same calm, grid-based layout as the rest of the identity, with an expressive layer over the top made up of the brush strokes, a large drawing, the title typeface, the textured cyanotypes and warm photography by Sofia Kulianu. “The large drawing works as the site’s anchor, much like Linda’s painting in the dining room. As you scroll, it stays fixed in the background while the content moves over it,” Kiss concludes.