Deep Throat Studio create a visual identity unbound by time for Ócuka

Deep Throat Studio, the Prague-based duo of Jozef Ondrik and Zdenek Kvasnica with a name you can’t forget, is back with a new project, creating the graphic identity for a film by visual artist Milan Mazúr.

Loosely inspired by a Haruki Murakami novel, Ócuka strikes a balance between “alternative film and video art,” the studio tells It’s Nice That. A mixture of formats, the artist and curator Pavel Kubesa wanted the film to be displayed via installation, and so the project combines scenography, architecture and theatre, “to place the whole installation to contemporary art institutional context,” at NoD Gallery in Prague.

In turn, Deep Throat Studio’s identity, which runs across online platforms and promotional posters, displays the working process, held together tightly by the studio’s strong typography design. “We processed and conceived the visual easily and directly,” Jozef and Zdeneke tell us. The direct quality of the work develops from an honest perspective of the designers, using screenshots to showcase moments of the film, the posters layer visuals together like tabs open on your desktop. White space is also used carefully, creating “a space for the additional information and the main title, Ócuka which is created with a distinctive headline old-style typeface.”

The typeface was designed by the duo especially for Ócuka, created while pinpointing elements of the film, from actual plot lines to the overall atmosphere. “There is no clear time in the movie, the future overlaps with the past,” the studio explains. Consequently, Deep Throat Studio merges nostalgia and utopia vs dystopia to create a typeface “that comes from the past to predict the near future, and maybe the future is happening now,” says the studio. To create a typeface with such a unique perspective unbound by time, the pair looked at the work of young typographer, Matej Vojtuš, basing its work on his typeface, Orion. Matej’s typeface spans time too as a digitisation of a very traditional typeface from 1960s Czechoslovakia by Stanislav Maršo.

Now explained, it’s easy to see Deep Throat Studio’s design decisions across Ócuka’s visual identity. Variants such as repetition are used to remind the viewer of “the circularity of time,” for instance, whereas hierarchy and the “very liquidity of the movie image,” is displayed through “strictly cropped image and chaos,” explains the studio.