Nick Adam — Chicago Graphic Design

The custom type plays on rhythmic spacing, weighting, and dramatic flat and round contrast.

The Silver Room’s identity uses a custom typeface that unified formal ideas such as openness and structure — a metaphor for the organizations position in the community — while paying respect to the pulse of Reid Miles’ Blue Note album covers (a favorite piece of cultural inspiration from the client).

Chicago’s Silver Room founder and 2018 Loeb Fellow, Eric Williams, approached Rick Valicenti and Nick Adam of Thirst to reimagine the visual identity of his retail community space. Harvard GSD describes Silver Room as “The intersection of the worlds of fashion, music and visual art. Williams is committed to creating spaces and curating events that strengthen the community and fuel positive economic impact.”

Williams innovates the traditional models of Urban Planning through intentionally evolving the Silver Room space to be a people-centered art and community enterprise. Our collaboration brought vision and a new comprehensive identity for the Silver Room. Nick’s type design unified formal ideas such as openness and structure while paying respect to the pulse of Reid Miles’ Blue Note album covers.

Client
Silver Room

Studio
Thirst

Team
Rick Valicenti — Design Direction
Nick Adam — Design Direction, Design, Type Design, Motion Graphics
John Pobojewski — Sound Design

Architectural rendering of the Hyde Park location by Jeremy Benson, Harvard University.

Hyde Park location

a full lowercase character set and neighborhood pride — Hyde Park and Wicker Park

identity contractions work perfectly for social media. Images from the Silveroom’s Beautiful People Block Part

postcard series for the Wicker Park pop up location

neighborhood posters were placed around Wicker Park

Wicker Park pop up storefront

retail packaging for clothing and jewelry

tissue wrapping paper — business card for scale

From the design process

Our client pointed us to the Blue Note albums designed by Reid Miles now in MoMA’s permanent collection. Miles typesetting expressed sonic rhythm.

The grid informs the construction of every letterform. The spacing is carefully designed to yield integral rhythmic relationships

dramatic contrast of flat and round forms pulse a rhythm through the repetition of ’r’s, ‘o’s, as in the ‘m’.

a lively connection across each postcard’s front and back

Quincey Jones’s Back on the Block album designed by Rick Valicenti in 1989 topped Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz Albums chart

The Wicker Park Pop-Up opening night. Images by Sebastian Hagan and Christopher Dylan Andre.