How did Pol Muxart combine tailoring and techno for Ballad Studio?

The Brand Identity: Ballad Studio began in Barcelona as a handcrafted clothing label. Its bespoke pieces with bold, expressive cuts quickly found their way onto celebrities and influencers. But the shift from atelier to professional brand required a system that could encompass both ends of what Ballad really is: a label rooted in tailoring heritage yet built for the techno scene and the nightlife it operates in.

Barcelona-based Creative Director & Graphic Designer Pol Muxart took this contradiction as the project’s organising principle, framing the identity around the idea of the ‘Unfitting Uniform’ – a phrase that doubles as positioning line and design instruction. The phrase works on two levels. It addresses the misfit who refuses to conform, and it describes the garments themselves, which use dropped crotches and oversized cuts to defy traditional tailoring. Muxart’s visual system extends that refusal. Elements never quite align on the grid, typography drifts off the baseline, and text blocks displace themselves from where the eye expects them.

“The typography dances and shifts,” Muxart explains, “ it’s a visual metaphor for the unfitting concept applied to editorial design.” The custom logotype is where the two worlds collide most visibly. Drawn as a calligraphic signature in the tradition of a master tailor’s mark, it has been hardened with abrupt angles and geometric cuts that make it feel more industrial.

“We wanted the logotype to feel like a human signature distorted by a raw, gritty aesthetic,” Muxart tells us, “a visual collision between the warmth of an artisan atelier and the coldness of a brutalist environment.” As a result, it reads as handwritten and machined at the same time. Sitting alongside it is a monogram that abstracts the brand’s initials into a butterfly silhouette. Where the logotype is sharp and weighted, the monogram is light, looped, and almost ornamental.

Muxart describes it as a way to introduce a more sophisticated element to the system, drawing on the logic of luxury monograms while reinterpreting their codes for Ballad. The butterfly also nods to the evocative quality of the name itself, balancing the logotype’s hardness with something more organic. Anchoring the wider typography is Plaak by 205TF, chosen for what Muxart calls its strategic neutrality. The technical sans serif holds the system together, and its industrial character provides the cold counterpoint to the logotype’s flourish.

Plaak carries the body copy, the labels, the displaced fragments of words that scatter across compositions, and lets the calligraphic lettering carry the brand’s expression. In the image direction, Muxart avoided both the futuristic tropes of techno branding and the conservative codes of classic tailoring, reaching for a brutalist register. High-contrast black and white, motion blur, off-centre framing, and inverted photographic negatives that flip chromatic values and unsettle the viewer’s relationship to the figure. Subjects are not ‘snapped’ into a pre-established frame.

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The article discusses a unique approach to brand identity that merges traditional and contemporary elements, which is significant for the design industry, though it may not have widespread implications for all brand strategy professionals.