Living Room

The whole point of creating this website was so i could post, explain or write about how i was doing design, even if only for myself. So digging up an older project to unpack.

Friends of mine ran an electronic music event series, visiting their friends living rooms and live-streaming it. Think boiler room but at someone's home. They had already settled on a name, Living Room, and asked if i could help them with a logo.

There's a wealth of metaphors in the name: the initials are like audio channels, L & R. The room becomes 'alive'. Streaming happens 'live'. A ‘room’ being a space where something happens and so on.

I gravitated towards separating the 'living' and the 'room'. Depicting them as separate parts, one as something mutable and the other as something immutable or fixed. This led me to play around with the word room, simple geometric shapes. I'd explore the 'living' later.

I especially found the capital R to be an interesting character. It's asymmetric, plus it has a closed bowl and a diagonal leg. It's distinctive.

So i took the R, and cut off its bowl.

Simplified the remaining shape.

And stylized it.

As for the 'living', i checked my own living room, it was shaped like a trapezoid. Most rooms arent exact rectangles or squares. They have their quirks like recesses, pillars, nooks, crannies, angled walls and so on. So i sketched some rooms and dropped them on the grid:

Combine it with the stylized R and it results in a mark that has those mutable and immutable qualities i was looking for.

So the general idea was that , they'd napkin-sketch me the general layout of the room they were about to have an event in, and i'd create the symbol for that event. This worked for collaborative or club events too. For the colors, no rules, whatever felt right for the event was ok.

The events didn't run for long before winding down, so only a few designs survive. As an online-first project, the designs were mostly used across digital platforms.