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Opinion by Richard Baird.
The Dayrooms is a womenswear store, located in Nottinghill, created by Aytan Mehdiyeva and Zumrud Mammadova. The store gives a UK platform to emerging Australian designers and is an expression of Aytan and Zumrud’s shared passion for fashion and travel, and Aytan’s love of photography, textiles and Australian craftsmanship. This is reflected throughout The Dayroom’s brand identity, developed by Two Times Elliott, not only in the simple but carefully crafted intersection of reductive graphic expression and material detail, but in the concept of curated moments, expressed through language, image and objects.
Although there is an unmistakable material beauty to the work, well-suited to a tightly curated fashion boutique, and working as an appropriate expression of the founder’s interest in craftsmanship, it is the concept of curated memories that is a particular highlight.
Two Times Elliott describe this as a narrative approach, and bears something in common with a personal journal, blending image and words that capture a series of moments. The choice of language across the store windows and screen printed across bags and use of photography within the context of business cards, tags and small stickers over the top of bags provide space for patrons to place themselves within these moments, or call to mind mind memories.
Photography, in its cropping and content, while well-shot and close to something you might see in an online travel journal or IG account, is smart enough not to be an identifiable location, open enough to speculatively draw on the memories of patrons. Many of these feel familiar. This continues through to copywriting, and presumably through to the choice of objects in store. It lends a distinctive and conceptual weight to the work where graphic expression is left to a functional and minimum.
Typography plays a neat roll in segmenting ideas. An uppercase, monolinear sans-serif logotype effectively links a variety of printed materials, a serif calls out a series of moments across bags and window decals, and slab serif, some form of typewriter typeface, delivers information across labels and business cards with a journal-like immediacy. These function in a similar way online, as header, menu items and content, respectively.
Graphic expression and physical detail are effectively weaved together. There is a simplicity and effortless beauty to these, with variety in structure, material texture and print finish to keep it interesting. Paper choice and print finish and type, space and colour deliver a materiality in line with The Dayroom founder’s interest in craftsmanship, with a lightness that blends something of the urban location in the grey, a personable and warmer pink and a more conventional but universal premium quality in the use of a gold block foil. More work by Two Times Elliott on BP&O.
Design: Two Times Elliott. Print Production: Nirvana CPH. Opinion: Richard Baird.
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