Berlin-based techno label Spellbound was founded last year by Shaleen, a DJ, producer, and the woman behind the SURD series of femme- and queer-centric events. Known for her 90’s-infused vinyl-only sets and her ethos of looking back at techno’s roots in order to move it forward, it makes sense that her own label is something of an ode to Berlin’s techno heritage.

As such, when Studio Gruhl (House of Reptile) – also based in Berlin – was brought in to create the identity for the label, it also opted to anchor the visual aspects of the brand in the city’s techno-soundtracked cultural histories; while retaining some cues familiar to the genre – a largely black and white colour palette; bold, blocky, no-nonsense all-caps type, et al.

And while a sort of futuristic web3.0 vibe isn’t exactly new to electronic music branding, here, Studio Gruhl has done such a suburb job with its array of glitchy, 3D, abstracted glooping illustrative nuances that it feels totally fresh, exciting, and just the right amount of subversive.

The identity is based around three central conceptual ‘pillars’, as Studio Gruhl founder Malte Gruhl puts it: ‘Attitude of Berlin’, representing the city’s distinctively uncompromising approach to nightlife, and its energy; ‘Traces of Berlin’, a nod to its layered history, as played out in the brand’s innovative use of found materials; and ‘Colours of the City’, in which the greyish streets of Berlin combine with the neon glow of its clubs lights, posters, patrons, and flyers to create its sonic, textural, and tonal palette.

These pillars serve as guiding principles for the brand, ensuring cohesion for something that could easily become confusing or unruly, thanks to its ambitious multifarious elements. That cohesiveness is also down to a central immovable framework that enables the brand to evolve in the same way a DJ builds a set, layering sounds, textures, and rhythms to create something joyful and new.

As Gruhl explains, all elements of the brand are rooted in a ‘kind of canvas – an underlying grid that, together with the colour palette, typeface, and logo, can work by itself or extend with 2D and 3D illustrations for stills and motion assets’. He continues, ‘Spellbound can turn up the volume by adding more and more elements on the canvas or be more restrained and direct if needed’.

The modular approach corrals an expansive library of over 50 graphic elements including analogue-formed textures; bold geometric forms; and raw, brutalist 3D renderings. These can be remixed and overlaid in endless possible permutations, creating a brand identity that, like techno itself, is never static – it can grow and modulate as the label itself does in future.

Given Spellbound’s deep reverence for vinyl culture and its connection to Berlin’s techno history, the 1990s served as a key visual reference point. Studio Gruhl sought to capture the era’s DIY, underground aesthetic – think clubs sited in abandoned warehouses, and flyers collaged from photocopied textures and hand-cut typography.

Alongside the black and white of the central Spellbound wordmark, a slightly off-kilter palette nods to weathered, torn fluorescent club posters; while Gruhl created textures for use across various brand touchpoints by layering hand-made scans of things like torn posters. These resolutely hand-wrought elements carve out a nice counterbalance to the fiercely digital precision of other aspects of the identity, once again reinforcing the label’s own marriage of techo-past with techno-future.

One of the main design challenges in creating the identity for a label is in making sure that while the brand is instantly recognisable and ownable, it never overshadows the individual artists it platforms. That’s why the logomark ‘needed to be quite robust and create a certain visual urgency’, says Gruhl. ‘It had to work across multiple touchpoints and function in a co-branding environment, as well as by itself in smaller spaces.’

The custom wordmark is bold, but not too out-there – it didn’t need to be. Indeed, the typography choices were deliberately democratic – they’re all open source fonts – to ensure that they were accessible and easy to use for those working at the label in future to apply the brand. The wordmark itself is based off Anton by Google fonts, which is supported by Nimbus Sans L (a version of Nimbus Sans using Adobe font sources) – both straightforward but bold sans serifs.

While such elements are super simple, almost minimalist, the vast array of possibilities offered by the grid-based concept around mixing and matching more than 50 individual elements means that the brand is in a state of constant evolution, a lot like techno itself.

Studio Gruhl has proven its smarts here in making something thoroughly new, but still with enough cues from the historical cues of techno as a genre that you know where you are – it doesn’t try to rewrite the rulebook, rather create a fresh chapter within it. Spellbound’s brand identity is not just a static set of design elements – it’s a dynamic, fluid system that’s firmly future-facing, while utterly grounded in the heritage of the Berlin underground.