Eugene Kazakov

Brand Designer, Austin, TX

About

Contact me

Eugene Kazakov

Brand Designer, Austin, TX

About

Contact me

Eugene Kazakov

Case study — Brand strategy · Identity · Naming · Creative direction · 2023–2024

Sojmonov

A brand built from one man's biography — for a heritage building on Moscow's Sojmonovsky Lane, facing the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, converted into luxury residences.

Interiors by KSR Architects, London

My role

Brand strategy, research, product strategy, visual identity, art direction.

Scope

Research → positioning → product program → brand promise → identity system → campaign image.

Production

Campaign image, illustrations and the interactive 3D scene made solo, with Midjourney and Spline. No outside production team.

Status

Approved by the developer. The building is under construction and not yet on the market.

Part one

Strategy

Strategy

Strategy

  1. Context

The address was good enough to be the name

A 1902 landmark on one of the few streets where Moscow's century is visible from the window.

The building was carved into rental micro-offices through the Soviet decades. It is now being converted to luxury residences, with its landmark status intact.

It faces a spot that has been a cathedral, then an open-air swimming pool, then a cathedral again. The century played out in one line of sight.

Sojmonovsky Lane and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, 1931.

Photo: Branson DeCou.

Sojmonovsky Lane and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, 1931.

Photo: Branson DeCou.

The Moskva swimming pool on the cathedral's site, early 1960s.

Photo: Naum Granovsky.

And the list of assets is real. A living-room view of the cathedral: Moscow's version of a Capitol view, and only five to seven residential addresses on this bank of the river have one. British architecture inside a landmarked shell. Materials, service, privacy.

So the client's proposal made sense: Call it Sojmonovsky 7, or just 7.
Draw a beautiful numeral and you have a brand.

  1. Research

Then I looked up who the lane was named after

Mikhail Sojmonov. The house was his.

Mikhail Sojmonov, 1730–1804. A Russian statesman with a talent for turning expertise into institutions. Two of them are still open.

The Mint

He ran the Empire's coinage for Catherine the Great and struck her copper rubles.

•

Coinage

•

Copper

A copper ruble from the reign of Catherine the Great.

The Mines

He organized Russian mining and sent out the first state ore-prospecting expeditions.

•

Malachite

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Ore

The Future

He argued that mines run on wages would outproduce mines run on forced labor.

•

Freedom

•

Enterprise

•

Dignity

•

Independent mind

The School

In 1773 he founded the Mining School, where the country's technical education begins.

Today — Russia's oldest technical university.

•

Engineering

•

Builder

The Museum

In 1773 he opened Russia's second public museum — at a time when the Hermitage was still a private collection.

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Patronage

•

The Museum

The Mining Museum, St Petersburg — founded 1773.

  1. My Insight

That is not a name on a street sign.

That is a brief.

If the lane had been named after an ordinary senator, this would be a different case study. Research changed the brief. “Sojmonovsky” just means “Sojmonov's.” The name went one step past the street sign — from the lane to the man.

The portrait also suggested a buyer of the same type: enterprise and a long view, dignity and freedom as working principles, patrons who share what they own. Publicly active — and short of the one thing money doesn't buy, the right circle.

•

Independent mind

•

Dignity

•

Enterprise

•

Freedom

  1. Brand Idea

Closed on the outside. Open on the inside.

A conflict inside the product, and the club that resolved it.

A building like this has to be closed — protocols, control, privacy. That same closedness isolates residents from one another, and removes exactly what this audience is short of.

The proposal: hard perimeter, open interior. A club, a bar and a program on the ground floor, open to residents and the guests they invite themselves. The client didn't ask for it. I proposed it.

•

Dignity

•

Freedom

The Sojmonov Club

The club on the ground floor — wine, food and art among neighbors you chose.

Mood image for the club, made with Midjourney.

One rule for every image: the people who live here have no faces. This audience isn't looking for a role model in an ad. The only faces belong to whoever is on stage — the lecturer, the musician, the David.

Lectures

Chamber concerts

Art Auctions

The biography became the filter for product decisions. There were many ways to fill that interior. The ones I kept were the ones with a source in his life.

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Patronage

•

The Museum

Proposed product program

The founder of a public museum gives you a museum program.

Night at the Museum

A resident's card for after-hours access to partner museums.

Exhibition previews

Curator-led, for residents and the people they bring.

Dinners and club nights

With artists and art historians, in the club.

Art on loan

A museum-grade work in the apartment, a month at a time.

Art advisor

Personal guidance for building a contemporary collection.

  1. Brand promise

Neighbors who need no introduction.

The perimeter is what makes the circle possible, not what replaces it.

Part Two

Identity

Identity

Identity

  1. Visual identity

Copper, malachite, and a hidden 7

Every element traceable to something Sojmonov did.

The wordmark

The client's “7” didn't go anywhere.

The building number hides in the wordmark's negative space — in the Latin version, inside an italic J. Hidden on purpose. This audience looks.

The word

The brand word is the Russian nastoyashchee (настоящее). It carries the idea of the present and of what is real. One word connecting the two: real value, real art in the home, real connections, and a building that isn't living in its own past.

The brand word is the Russian nastoyashchee (настоящее). It carries the idea of the present and of what is real. One word connecting the two: real value, real art in the home, real connections, and a building that isn't living in its own past.

My English rendering is Truly Original. It keeps “real” but loses “now.”

Typeface

•

Engineering

It comes from technical typography rather than the luxury shelf: uniwidth, low contrast, joints emphasized, letters built to a monospace width. A drafting-room letter for the man who built the Empire's mines, its mint and its engineering school.

It comes from technical typography rather than the luxury shelf: uniwidth, low contrast, joints emphasized, letters built to a monospace width. A drafting-room letter for the man who built the Empire's mines, its mint and its engineering school.

Heraldry

The mark cites the Sojmonov family heraldry — a noble line traced to the 16th century.

The Sojmonov family coat of arms.

The family Pegasus, redrawn with a ruler.

•

Engineering

Color and material

The palette comes from the biography rather than from a premium mood board: copper from the coins he minted, malachite from the Urals, whose mines he oversaw. The pair is closer than it looks — malachite is a copper ore. A metal and its stone.

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Malachite

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Copper

1E5C4B

Malachite

A9672F

Copper

E37230

Amber Rust

F4F2ED

Stone

Copper has a partner. Where the brand is metal, it's copper — and copper is never faked. Where it's leather, paper or fabric, it's Amber Rust: across the color wheel from malachite, bright and full of life.

Pattern

Copper coins and the Ural mines, abstracted into a surface that works from a business card to a wall.

•

Coinage

In use

Perforated leather, through-dyed paper, blind debossing and copper foil stamping.

  1. The campaign image

The past built the brand. The present is where it lives.

Sojmonov's history gives the brand its foundation, but it was never meant to become its subject.

His story can live in the brochure. The communication belongs to the present.

The people living here are brought together by art, pleasure, curiosity and the simple joy of being around interesting people. They have nothing to prove, and no reason to keep looking backwards.

So it was time to have some fun.

This is where the campaign image comes in: the full-size cast of Michelangelo's David from the Pushkin Museum, a few minutes' walk from the building, blowing a bubblegum bubble, smart glasses reflecting the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, his fingers folded in a gesture borrowed from icon painting.

It stayed a proposal. Facing Russia's main cathedral, that much irreverence was a risk — and I understand why.

The image puts everything the brand has accumulated into the present tense: the cathedral and the pop culture, the sacred and the everyday, the history and the attitude. 

Heritage without nostalgia. Luxury without solemnity.

  1. Reflection

None of it invented.
All of it read.

Sometimes a man who died in 1804 can decide the positioning, the product, the palette and the campaign image of a building going to market two centuries later.

There are always more product ideas than a project needs.

What decides is not which idea is best, but which one has a source.

Next Project:

Mellow