A full identity guide for an independent, community-centered movie theater — built to feel like a cultural hub, not just a place to watch a film.
Frame House is an independent, community-centered movie theater focused on preserving film culture and elevating indie, international, and underrepresented voices. Unlike traditional theaters, it operates as a living archive, where programming is shaped by both film history and community input.
Every shape in the mark is a quiet reference: the trapezoid nods to letterboxing, the practice of framing widescreen film on a narrower screen without losing its original ratio. The play-button triangle is a direct callback to Fantasmagorie (1908), one of the earliest animated films on record. The three overlapping rings echo the CMYK tints that made Technicolor's layered color processes possible.
Together, the shapes overlap the way film history does — built by people, and by time.
A geometric sans for structure, a warm serif for storytelling, and a technical grotesk for the digital product.
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Quicksand
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Newsreader
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Space Grotesk
Warm, slightly faded tones — closer to a found roll of film than a modern app icon.
Every circle, triangle, and trapezoid scattered across the identity traces back to a classic story arc — the rise-and-fall patterns writers have used for centuries to map narratives like Cinderella (rise-fall-rise), Oedipus (fall-rise-fall), and Man in a Hole (a fall followed by a rise). Each shape marks a beat plotted against the story's run time, in the spirit of Giorgia Lupi's data-humanism — using hand-drawn, personal marks to make data feel emotional rather than clinical.
That same visual language — a shape standing in for a story beat, a color standing in for a feeling — became the backbone of the whole system, resurfacing on the badges, the tote bag, and the popcorn cups.
Posters, tickets, badges, and merch — every touchpoint carries the same shapes, palette, and voice, so Frame House feels recognizable whether you're in the lobby or on the street.
01Out of home
02Ticketing
03On site
04Merchandise
05Apparel
Booking a seat, browsing what's playing, and exploring the catalog all needed to feel like the same Frame House.
I learned how to turn data and history into a logo — distilling decades of film history, from letterboxing to Fantasmagorie to Technicolor's CMYK tints, into three simple shapes that still carry that meaning.
A brand has to live across every deliverable, not just the logo lockup. Posters, tickets, badges, merch, and an app all need to feel unmistakably Frame House — easy to brand, and easy to tell apart from anything else on the street.
The way to get there is a consistent color palette that's unique and rooted in something real. Grounding Frame House's colors in the history of film gave the whole system a foundation, so every touchpoint feels like it belongs to the same theater.