Reinventing the well-known form of the award, the LA-based studio explores the weight, texture and feel of the gramophone.
It’s Nice That’s Liz Gorny chats with Public-Library about their Grammy work.
After being postponed due to the pandemic, the Grammys is right around the corner. This year, LA-based studio Public-Library has revamped its identity, delivering advertising, branding and its run-up campaign. For the 64th iteration of the identity, Public-Library knew there was one symbol they wanted to hone in on: the gramophone. Reinventing the well-known form through a series of extensive textural explorations, the studio came up with an identity that uses colour to envision music genres and motion to explore the emotional and physical weight of the gramophone.
Ramón Coronado, Public-Library co-founder tells It’s Nice That: “We played with the gramophone as an object: what is it made of, is it heavy, is it light, is it reflective, is it matte?” Trying out concrete, marble, paper, spray paint and illustrating it in “every way [they] could think of”, Ramón and co-founder Marshall Rake ran through a whopping “couple hundred different gramophone studies and explorations”.
The final result moves towards metallics and experimentations with light. As for the emotional aspect of the object, Marshall explains that motion design was crucial to creating branding that emotes. The co-founder adds: “[We] had a lot of different conversations with people who have interacted with the Grammys: talking about what the Grammys mean to them, and learning what we could draw from that.”