We’ve covered no shortage of work by Pentagram in the past, most recently Cohere but spanning projects for London Fashion Week, NYC Parks, National History Museum and more. This is the first time, however, that we’ve looked at a project by new-ish New York office partner Andrea Trabucco-Campos and his team – and it’s safe to say, we’re impressed.

Graphic and type designer Trabucco-Campos joined the agency in September last year, having previously worked as creative director at Gretel and DesignStudio, as well as taking on stints at Pentagram as a designer and associate partner. His practice is heavily typography-focused (as is obvious in this new work), and over the last decade or so he’s worked with the likes of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Apple, The New York Times, and United Nations. His projects have included designing identities for theatres, film festivals, books, websites, and more; and creating a number of custom typefaces for publications and organisations.

Here, however, we’re focusing on this recent identity for Bacàn, which seems to align perfectly with both Trabucco-Campos’ Columbian-Italian background and his typographic nous. Based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Italian restaurant Bacàn reopened earlier this year ‘with renewed energy, culinary ideas and a restructured interior’; and Trabucco-Campos’ team was brought in to create a new brand identity spanning a bespoke typeface, signage, and environmental graphics.

With big, blocky text that looks like early 20th woodcuts and monochromatic geometric shapes that recall Vorticism, the type reminds me of that used in short lived magazine Blast, the two-issue printed home of the movement in Britain largely written by Wyndham Lewis and catalysed by the influence of Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

All too often we see a cliched take on ‘Italian’ visual language: while it can be charming, the whole orange and blue, faintly rustic Campari stuff has been rather overdone in certain spaces (namely eye-wateringly expensive organic-centric food stores called things like ‘Comestibles and Sons’ in places like Stoke Newington, or, indeed, Williamsburg).

As such, it’s really nice to see an identity that’s firmly Italian, but with roots outside of the same Mediterranean hot colours, ‘just like Mama used to make’, terracotta tiles sphere. Bacàn’s identity is bold, stark, and feels refreshingly original, but not so out there that it’s bucking the trend for the sake of it – the branding perfectly fulfils the brief of signalling Bacàn’s  ‘unique Italian roots, while standing apart from the overcrowded NYC landscape of other restaurants in that genre’.

As well as looking to early 20th century Italian Futurism (with a special nod to Fortunato Depero) and Vorticism, as well as mid-century op-art patterns, the visual concept for the most part draws on the name itself. Pentagram says that in Northern Italy, the word Bacàn translates loosely as ‘the loud sound of a great dinner party’.

This led the design team to the idea of using letterforms as soundwaves to capture that sense of dynamism and energy; using the negative spaces created through use of just black and white to create a sense of rhythm and texture that manages to be boisterous and occasionally shouty without ever being vulgar or annoying – it’s tipsily fun, rather than drunkenly boorish.

For me, the standout star of the branding is undoubtedly that type: the team created a custom typeface called Grand Bacàn Sans, which is inspired by the metal and woodcut type popular in early 1900s Italy. To underscore that sonic concept that underpins the identity, the typeface was created in three different weights (‘from loud to loudest’)  to allow for the ‘volume’ to be adjusted according to its application.

The various styles and weights of Grand Bacàn Sans are used in different combinations throughout the identity, further bringing that energy and playfulness to the whole thing. In places, the typeface is used alongside contemporary slab-serif Piek by Swiss foundry Optimo, chosen for its legibility, personality and the way that it feels ‘both old and new’.

Small illustrations complement the letterforms throughout the Bacàn branding; and once again these play with the idea of overlapping and variations in visual volume, with motion amplifying this further. ‘This tension between communication and abstraction is at the heart of the visual interest for the identity’, Pentagram explains.

Thanks to the limited colour palette and sharp graphic shapes, the identity for Bacàn somehow mimics that polyphonic sense of heightened emotion that a raucous evening brings  – the shared feeling that no one wants the evening to end, or that someone may or may not do something outlandish. In short, it’s fun.