Can you visually capture how dancing feels? Inside Las Cabbalos’ expressive social identity for Public Records

It’s not the first time that Los Cabbalos, a design studio based in Buenos Aires, has worked with Public Records, a music venue and cultural space based in Brooklyn, New York. With a website crafted by the studio, who developed the landing site to mimic the liveliness and warmth of a live space, are you surprised Los Caballos was invited back to collaborate on a brand new social media system?

Social media identities are more work than one sometimes imagines: Los Caballos designed templates, layouts, motion and typographic assets for club posters, line-ups, schedules and editorial content. Conceiving an entire ecosystem is no small task – and this one is built to subvert conventional nightlife communication systems and lean into a more cinematic and expressive language.

“We wanted to move away from the patterns most clubs repeat when they communicate, and focus instead on the concepts that actually drive the Public Records team’s cultural interests: movement, ritual, spirituality, balance and imbalance, cause and effect,” says Nico Di Filippo director of Los Caballos, who looked at the aesthetics of Kabbalah and universal laws for inspiration. “That’s why we started experimenting with layouts that feel almost physical, playing with weight and repetition. I think it’s exactly because we went looking outside the usual nightlife references that we landed on a visual system that feels genuinely authentic.”

The identity borrows from WiseType, Jacob Wise’s foundry, using it’s Garamono typeface, which captures a kind of timelessness in its serif letterforms, accentuating a mystery in the way its strokes hold weight and details that don’t immediately place it in any one era. “Ritual was a big part of the thinking behind this project overall, and typographically we were looking for that same quality: forms that feel deliberate, almost ceremonial, rather than purely functional,” says Nico. “It was the first typeface the studio thought of. It handled that strangeness, that sense of time, better than anything else.”

The identity features minimal, but highly expressive illustrative elements that look like block prints – although the studio works mostly in digital formats, that doesn’t hinder its penchant for physicality and design roots in poster making and screen printing. “We made a huge number of illustrations and assets, almost like a game with no fixed objective. Once we had a surplus of them, we built out a set that lets the Public Records team play with these illustrations, almost like objects, within the identity system,” says Nico. Nico says the studio “thinks of pixels and colour as materials too”, which adds a richness to the identity’s textures.

Deconstructed figurative illustrations depict the in-between of movement and dance, suggesting they’re both one in the same. This is part of the human mark, an ability to leave ambiguity in design – it’s a major goal for Los Caballos, who had no concrete inspirations in the traditional sense for this project, but more so spiritual inspirations, rooted in Latin America, emotion and most of all: the ways we move and feel in these dark, smoky music venues.