Deep Throat Studio may have been borne out of failure but it thrives today

Date
16 October 2018

Deep Throat Studio is a Prague-based graphic design studio founded by Jozef Ondrik and Zdenek Kvasnica. We’ve long admired the studio’s output across print and web design, creating a broad output for a range of clients from large firms to non-profit organisations since they started out five years ago. Despite the fact that Deep Throat Studio have several brilliant projects to highlight, the studio was actually borne out of a “total fail from start to finish” when the pair were first commissioned to design a visual identity for a fashion house in LA. Although the project deteriorated, Jozef and Zdenek explain how “funnily enough it made us stronger and brought us closer together and that’s how it all began.”

The studio serves as an open space for collaboration and discussion within graphic design. Additionally working alongside the designer Matus Buranovsky, Deep Throat Studio produces ultramodern work for forward-thinking clients. An example of this is Deep Throat’s visual identity for for Hudba Praha 2018; a cultural project in Brno showcasing a series of concerts and club nights exploring contemporary experimental music. The designers reflect these concepts through visuals which overlap clashing typefaces and appear at varying depths to create a bold and memorable design. Speaking to It’s Nice That, Jozef and Zdenek explain that when “layers overlap each other, something is lost in the dark and others enter the foreground,” they say of their design decisions. And as a result, “daring typography, high contrast, noise, and dark backgrounds” form the assertive visual identity.

A further new project, Prag Kassel: Hybrid Inconvenience is a collaboration with Dušan Zahoranský and Pavla Scerankova’s studio from Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts, as well as Florian Slotawa’s studio at Kunsthochschule in Kassel. The group project involves “a long interest into the possibility of spatial forms in relation to changing social, cultural and technological paradigms”, with particular reference to the importance of the historic Munich agreement of 1938. The agreement permitted Nazi Germany to annex portions of Czechoslovakia in order to create a new territory named “Sudetenland” for the Nazi regime. As a result, Prag Kassel “investigates the possibilities of the Munich agreement’s symbolic potential through the language of contemporary visual art and questions Czech-German mutual history and identity.” The variations of extended type represent the rapidly changing borders throughout this tumultuous period, the vast contrast between the type’s width evoke the fast-paced geographical changes of the time.

Most recently, Jozef and Zdenek are collaborating with Matej Vojtus on the type foundry Regular Lines. Its first typeface recently released is called Unno, and the type foundry are currently working on two more typefaces as well as a new website. With contrasting thicks and thins and angled ascenders, Unno is a stylish typeface and sets the precedent for a series of well-designed custom typefaces in the future.

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Deep Throat Studio: Hudba Praha 2018

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Deep Throat Studio: Hudba Praha 2018

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Deep Throat Studio: Hudba Praha 2018

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Deep Throat Studio: Prag Kassel: Hybrid Inconvenience

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Deep Throat Studio: Prag Kassel: Hybrid Inconvenience

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Deep Throat Studio: Regular Lines

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Deep Throat Studio: Regular Lines

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Deep Throat Studio: Regular Lines

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Deep Throat Studio: Regular Lines

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Deep Throat Studio: Regular Lines

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Deep Throat Studio: Bill of Fare

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Deep Throat Studio: Bill of Fare

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About the Author

Jyni Ong

Jyni joined It’s Nice That as an editorial assistant in August 2018 after graduating from The Glasgow School of Art’s Communication Design degree. In March 2019 she became a staff writer and in June 2021, she was made associate editor.

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