SOUVENIR DO PORTO

SOUVENIR DO PORTO / 2022

lettering / redesign / brand identity / portuguese brand

This project, carried out in pairs (José Nuno Soares and Leonor Tomé) in the scope of the Design I course, aims to recreate an old Portuguese brand, reinterpreting it and proposing a new version adapted for the current time.

We chose for the project an album of photogravures of Porto entitled "Souvenir do Porto", present in the collection of our professor Antero Ferreira. Following his suggestion, we accepted the challenge of recreating and modernizing the lettering on the cover of this album.

Thus, our project consisted mainly in correcting some aspects of the lettering that we think could be improved, keeping its unique and exuberant character, and develop from it a brand specific to the city of Porto.

"Souvenir do Porto" is an album of photogravures of different places in the district of Porto. It was edited in 1900, in Lisbon, by Leopoldo Wagner and produced by Helder Pacheco. The landscapes represented are mostly located in the city of Porto, with some of them from other areas, such as Leça and Leixões.

This album is part of a collection of albums related to different places in Portugal: Souvenir do Minho, Souvenir da Ilha da Madeira, Souvenir da Figueira da Foz, Album de Lisboa, Souvenir do Bussaco and Recordação do Real Sanctuário do Bom Jesus do Monte, all of them with the red cover and the letters in gold.

The editor, Leopoldo Wagner, was a Portuguese liquor industrialist and master distiller in charge of the Âncora Factory from 1840 until the 1880s. He had an interest in photography and, like the albums he edited, the labels and poster of the Âncora Factory were also of evident beauty.

After completing the vectorisation of the lettering, we decided to make some changes in order to improve the clarity and legibility of the logo. To do so, we reduced some of the ornaments (for example, in the S in "Souvenir"). We also changed the word "do", from lower to upper case, in order to make it more coherent with the rest of the logo. Finally, we also tried to make the entire logo an unified shape, by making the ornaments on the first word of the logo interact with the other words.

In order to establish the brand identity as something unique to the city of Porto, we decided to change the colors of the original souvenir. We kept the gold, to convey the exuberant character we wanted to give to the brand. However, we changed the original red to dark blue, because we felt that blue would be a color that better represented the city of Porto.

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Besides the associations with the sea and the river, the dark blue is the negative color of the golden tone we chose. We tried to intensify the contrast between the two colors of the brand, thus making the golden lettering stand out when used on the blue background.