OSE

What they asked for

Juan and Emy are a couple and two coaches. They train people in Lausanne all year round, and several times a year they take a group away for a few days.

Their brief fitted on one line: a site that fills the events. Coaching brings in 80 % of their income, events 20 %, and it is the events they want to grow. Until then everything arrived as a private message on Instagram, which they answered one by one.

For the style, three words: luxurious, elegant, high end. Three sites they liked, one they rejected. And on colours and type, a brief left blank.

The gap

Their three references all say the same thing. Cream or beige ground, serif type, a lot of light: for them, luxury is bright. The one they rejected is white and orange, set condensed, and it belongs to a competitor in their own city.

I went the other way. A ground close to black, gold, silver, and a heavy condensed face in capitals.

Their word suited me, their way of saying it much less. That register is already crowded, and not one of their three examples had two people to introduce. I was after four things missing from their brief: energy, confidence, closeness, personality.

Dropped along the way: red, absent from the whole style sheet, and the sports photograph as an opening image.

Two marks for two people

The two panels on the home page carried a triangle and a tilde, two signs taken from the keyboard. A borrowed character does not make a mark: it belongs to the typeface.

What replaces them is a system of two: same frame, same stroke, opposite geometry. Angles for him, curves for her.

Juan served in the army, where he ended up running the soldiers’ training sessions. His mark is a double chevron, a rank insignia pointing upward, and also a notch, the word he uses on his own page. Emy’s is a double wave, for fluidity.

Dropped along the way: the dumbbell and the biceps, the two clichés of the gym; the lightning bolt; and the solid triangle, a redrawing of the old sign.

The art direction

Three typefaces, three jobs, no mixing. The mono for the eyebrows and the data, Anton in capitals for the headlines, Archivo for anything read at length. The distance between the smallest size and the largest gives the rhythm of a magazine.

Gold belongs to the brand and to Emy, silver to Juan. A first pair, olive and garnet, came out the same to a colour-blind eye. Gold and silver do not.

Silver has its limit: perfect on the dark ground, it disappears inside a light paragraph, where it had erased the drop cap on Juan’s page. In those places, gold takes over.

One page per personality

The navigation carries six entries: Home, Coaching, Juan, Emy, Events, Contact. The two first names come before Events, on a site whose whole reason for being is to fill them. The visitor picks the person before the service.

Each has a page, a large portrait, an accent colour, a mark and a word. The contact button on each page writes to the right person.

The rest of the site holds them together: same black, same gold, same typeface. You change person without changing house.

Their voice, my frame

The words are theirs, and the rule held to the end: their words do not get rewritten. Juan’s biography was cut, never reworded. Emy’s text about her evening is her own. They both read the whole site before it went live.

What I decided is who speaks, and when. “I” on each of their own pages, “we” on the shared ones.