OLD CASTLE | Heritage Brand Identity

Branding | Identity System | Cultural HeritageBrief: The Old Castle in Grodno is a 14th–16th century fortress, once the residence of Lithuanian Grand Dukes and Polish Kings, now a museum. The problem: it reads as a monument, not a living place—and it must stand out among several competing castle museums in Belarus while speaking to very different visitors, from history teachers to students filming for social media.Idea: Don’t invent a color palette—take it straight from the building. The castle’s own red roof and silver-blue dome became the brand’s only two accents, carried on white. The positioning follows the same logic: not an artifact under glass, but a Guardian—a living symbol that keeps the thread between past and present.Solution: A logo built from the dome’s silhouette, and a strict two-color system extended across every touchpoint—staff and guide badges, a printed guide, a scarf patterned from the castle gate’s ironwork, packaging, signage, and the website.Result: A coherent, scalable identity that reads as alive rather than monumental—holding together across merchandise, staff branding, and digital, and standing apart from every other castle brand that still looks like a plain heritage site.

WHY FEMINISM DOESN’T NEED AESTHETICS | an editorial design for an essay on feminism and art

book design | typography | contemporary artBrief: design the layout for Rita Felski’s essay «Why Feminism Doesn’t Need Aesthetics”—a text exploring feminism’s internal contradiction: it critiques aesthetics for placing „male“ art on a pedestal for centuries while ignoring women, yet it still requires aesthetics because art is precisely what allows one to speak, express oneself, and push back against injustice. The task was to make the design embody this contradiction, not merely illustrate it.Idea: transform the physical book into an unfolding argument. The cover acts as a „pink wrapper”—a deliberate stereotype the reader must peel back to reach the core subject: the names of the women who changed art. The essay’s central question—a quote from Lyudmila Bredikhina’s Forbes interview—is positioned to greet the reader the moment they open the book.Solution: the layout guides the reader from the superficial wrapper to the substantial content. The pink „band“ cover maintains the stereotype on the exterior. Inside, green, text-free spreads create a deliberate pause for the reader’s own perception—a space to prepare before the genuine conversation about feminism and art begins. Captions are integrated directly onto the images rather than placed beside them; they break into the frame, disrupt the grid, and command space for themselves, because a woman artist’s name must be seen, not relegated to a caption line.Result: a book where the typography enacts the essay’s conflict rather than describing it: the reader physically sheds the cover’s stereotype, moves through the silent interlude of the green pages, and finally encounters the names the text insists on making visible. The book’s form becomes a second layer of Felski’s argument.

THE CREATURE | book for a play

book design | typography | contemporary dramaBrief: «The Creature» is Valery Semenovsky’s dramatic fantasy, based on Fyodor Sologub’s novel *The Petty Demon*—a story about a literature teacher, Peredonov, who descends into madness as he obsesses over a promotion and begins seeing conspiracies everywhere. He is haunted by the Untouchable Thing—a small, grey, invented creature that his fear takes shape as. The brief was to make the layout itself perform Peredonov’s unraveling, not just to typeset the text that describes it.Idea: treat the creature not as a character to illustrate, but as a typographic event. It isn’t described separately—it intrudes directly into Peredonov’s speech: before each of his lines, a ghostly echo of his own words appears, as if it were feeding him the line a second before he says it. It follows no rules, grows as his madness grows, and by the climax takes over not just his mind but the page itself.Solution: the creature gets its own typeface, Kommuna—cold and mechanical against the body text’s classical Scotch Micro (stage directions are set in Scotch Modern italic). Its text is a shrunken, fragmentary pre-echo of Peredonov’s lines, breaking out of the six-column grid (the body text sits on four), spilling into running heads and the main text block. Peredonov’s most self-revealing, ugly lines—the ones he genuinely delights in—are set apart in the text, with the creature «rejoicing» in the background. Derzhavin’s ode «God, ” stripped of its original devotional meaning, is read not by Peredonov but by the creature—signaled purely by the typeface switch. In the second half, the creature’s echo multiplies and crowds out the main text more aggressively, building to the final scene—a murder, where the creature visibly wins.Result: a layout where the character’s psychological collapse is legible before the reader even parses what the lines say—just from how the type behaves on the page. The typography becomes a second voice running alongside Semenovsky’s text.