How Only reworked blackletter for London night-time venue Palais

The Brand Identity: Palais is a 500-capacity night-time venue, set within a former department store in London – marking the return of a long-closed Peckham landmark to active cultural use. Manchester-based brand strategy and design agency Only was brought in to develop the identity, building it around a single organising idea: where music reigns. The wordmark sits at the centre of the system. Blackletter is an intentionally unusual choice for a nightclub, particularly one positioned around a serious sound system. “Blackletter has the right attitude, but we didn’t want it to feel overly decorative or nostalgic,” Only’s Creative Director Matthew Tweddle explains.

The forms have been stripped back and rebuilt geometrically, with the rhombus shapes that appear throughout the letters drawn from the central diamond in the symbol. The result is a subtle contemporary twist on the genre, with diagonal terminals on the ‘P,’ stacked rhombuses inside the ‘a,’ and a diamond as the tittle of the ‘i’ – all giving the wordmark a feel closer to electronic music than something medieval. The symbol that informs those letter forms came first.

Drawn from the first-floor architecture of the Jones & Higgins building that houses the venue, it abstracts a crown into five shapes set above a horizontal bar – four circles flanking a central diamond. It functions as a logomark in its own right, and as a visual key that connects the typography back to the building. For the supporting typography, Only chose Portrait and Haas from Commercial Type. Portrait’s sharp cuts and tension pick up the energy in the logotype, doing the work for headline and listing typography across event posters and the printed programme.

Haas takes the smaller functional details, set in uppercase across addresses, listings and credits. “Using a serif for a nightclub felt like a deliberate shift,” Tweddle tells us. “It brings a sense of confidence and restraint, particularly for the Ballroom upstairs.” The Ballroom – a restored first-floor cocktail bar and listening space that shifts into a DJ room later in the evening – sits above the 500-capacity basement built around a Funktion-One system. There is no fixed colour palette.

“The logotype is distinctive enough to carry the identity without relying on colour for recognition,” Tweddle reveals, with the system instead designed to absorb whatever colour a season, line-up or campaign calls for. The launch materials lean almost entirely on black and white, with Shaun Peckham’s grain-heavy portrait photography providing the tonal range.

A spring season poster pairs the wordmark with a single high-contrast portrait; a Desire Party poster for Arlo Parks runs the same layout in two versions, one with a full-bleed close-up, the other reduced to a small framed portrait on white. The building itself was wrapped in scaffolding during the refurbishment, which left Only without a usable photograph of the façade for launch comms. They worked with Culte Commun on a series of 3D renders to fill that gap. “They absolutely nailed it,” Tweddle says.

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The article discusses a unique branding strategy for a new venue, showcasing innovative typography use, which is significant for the design industry but may not have widespread implications beyond this specific case.