In any city, there are a host of people that act as a common social ground for everyone living there. They are the kind of people who make you feel at home even though you have maybe never talked to them.

Just before the pandemic, I, together with fellow filmmaker Peter Johansson, set out to document some of these characters in our city of Malmö. The project, Alla Känner Alla, ended up as a small video portrait catalog of some of the city’s well known faces.

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For the visual identity of the project, I wanted to create something that would give these characters an air of importance and elegance. In short, I wanted to treat them like royalty.

I ended up drawing inspiration from Victorian style architecture and ornaments, the idea being to play with the contrast of a simple aesthetic, underlined by victorian flourishes. Importantly, most of the talking would still done by the content itself, while the ornamental elements would give it identity and weight.

These are the ornaments that became part of the final design.

They were then incorporated into the web platform interface as well as social media content.