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OF CULTURE
Visual id.
Website
- Citizens of Culture is a cultural partnership studio in Los Angeles—part editorial, part gathering organiser. It supports the development of complex thinking and emotional intelligence for the dancer, the thinker, the aesthete, the trouble-maker.
See it live
- Maceo had been lifting this vision for years. A platform for intellectual social gatherings—events, essays, conversations that refuse the shallow. When he came to us, Citizens of Culture existed as a dormant seed: the intent was intact, but the vessel had gone quiet. He needed someone to give form to a world he'd envisioned.
I
Tone
- The first challenge was calibrating atmosphere. A cultural platform for complex thinkers tips easily into pretension—or worse, into the generic "community" aesthetic that communicates nothing.
- We studied how editorial publications balance density with breathing room. How Maceo's gathering spaces signal a sense of nurture. The references were more architectural than digital: a reading room with afternoon light, a gallery where the walls do the talking.
II
Identity
- Many cultures, all citizens. The visual identity was founded upon grounds of diversity. The logo reflected that —different typefaces coexist in a rich harmony found nowhere else.
- We developed a typographic system rooted in editorial tradition. Structured, but alive. Unicode symbols (✒︎, ✹, ☻, ☕︎) became section markers, lending the interface a quality somewhere between a printed index and a personal notebook.
- III
- Website
- The site was designed as a living publication. On the homepage, ten items—articles and events—are handpicked by Maceo, giving him full editorial control over sequence and emphasis. The homepage is a curatorial act, not a chronological feed.
- ✸ Each event page carries its own color scheme, named not after hues but after emotional registers: Growing Pains, Winter Solitude, Nervous Excitement, Burning Bridges. These weren't decorative. They were atmosphere—a signal to the reader that this piece will ask something of them.
- IV
- CMS
- Most content management feels like filing taxes. We wanted Maceo's to feel like arranging a bookshelf. Built entirely custom, with only modules that made sense to him —he creates, edits, and sequences content with full control over imagery, metadata, and color theming. We shaped the tool iteratively around his editorial instinct rather than around features.
- Built with Next.js. Designed by Leo B. Foureaux and engineered alongside Mateus Dal Bianco, in Italy for Los Angeles.