The Story of Jack-in-the-box.

In the summer of ’96 I had just finished the rebranding project of Ursus (the first one), the national launch had already been done in the spring, the numbers looked promising and everyone was happy with the reception of the new Ursus on the market when I received a new challenge. Studio Impress Design, at that time the first professional prepress studio, today a large printing house in Cluj, asked me to build their visual identity from A to Z, meaning from the logo to their office supplies and applications, including the Standards Manual. I can say that it was the second personal project I worked on from start to finish, after the rebranding of Ursus.

Jack-in-the-box was born after a lot of sketches and discussions with Toni Miron, the boss of Impress. In the end, we both knew the direction in which we wanted to go: towards an extremely vivid, youthful visual identity (we did not exclude the possible “childish” aspect at all), very modern and which would encompass the sudden element of novelty, surprise – given that Impress was at that time at least 10 years ahead of what was on the market in regards to prepress technology and business approach – we are talking here about a massive and courageous investment of several hundred thousand dollars.

After exploring many ideas, I drew a cute little girl being pushed by a bow, jumping out from an open box. A little too much and too figurative, we wanted something more essential and modern, while still retaining the “nice” factor. The choice of colours was easy, the nice colour was of course bright orange, and for the name Impress I chose cyan, a basic colour in prepress and printing. From then on it was much simpler, following the design of the office, applications and the achievement of usage standards.
As a footnote, the previous visual identity of Impress was also drawn by me. Unfortunately, I no longer have that logo in my archive. Also, as a footnote, Toni and Mihaela Miron from Impress were the ones who helped me a lot with their technology, time and consumables to set up the rebranding project of Ursus “by the book”.

Thank you!