MatthewLiegghio

Construction is under way on a former lodge site in the Almaguin Highlands. Doors open in 2027, which meant branding a place nobody can walk into yet. The mark is a four point star inside an ellipse. People read it as a portal or as light sitting on water, and both readings are fine by me. Rotate it, repeat it, and it becomes the pattern that runs the walls, the wax seal, the journal and the feed.

Year

2025

Scope

Mark, wordmark, pattern system, colour, journal, social, image direction

Wordmark

Final direction selected by the client from options presented

Imagery

Generated, since the property is still under construction

Status

Client work, in use ahead of a 2027 opening

A 270 page book on peace, purpose and happiness, aimed at readers who would never pick up a religious text. The job was to make ancient philosophy feel contemporary without stripping the weight out of it. Three parts, each opening on a single word set at the full width of the spread, and a run of guided meditations sitting inside the book on photography and colour. Body text keeps a quiet serif and a narrow measure so a long argument stays readable.

Year

2023

Scope

Grid, type system, section openers, image direction, layout

Extent

270 pages, hardcover

Status

Client work, published

A collab tee for Carnivore Aurelius and Broya. The brand runs on a half serious creed, eat meat, get sunlight, have a silly goose time, and the merch had to be funny without being a joke shirt. I wanted it to feel like a grocery rather than a gym, so instead of icons or a 3D render I commissioned a painted still life, briefed the palette and the food list, and worked an illustrator through composition rounds until the pile read as one shape at shirt scale. The type plays it straight against the humour. Clean red caps, a hand lettered Carnivore, and a small badge reading The Liver Club, like a membership card for people in on it. A second direction set the same line in formal copperplate script, where the elegance is the joke.

Scope

Art direction, illustrator commissioning, type, garment layout

Directions

Two, front and back planned as a pair

Status

Launched

Berlin, 2019. A friend and I wanted a magazine about experimental music and art, so we made one. Eight issues later it was sitting in thirty-odd independent shops across Europe and North America. I ran the art direction. Heavy display type against a lot of white, black spreads where an essay needed to change gear, and a grid loose enough that a photographer could take a page.

Year

2019 – 2025

Scope

Identity, art direction, layout, print production

Extent

Eight issues, 160 pages each

Status

Published, stocked in 30+ shops across the EU and North America

Nobody had written down how this brand should behave, so every brochure and trade show panel got invented from scratch by whoever was making it. The guide runs 72 pages and covers the usual ground. The part worth showing is the drawing. I had their production lines redrawn as line art, then cropped in hard, a gear tooth or a length of conveyor blown up until it works as texture behind a headline or a frame around a photograph. The same crop logic runs the product grid on their site. Their marketing team has no designer on staff and can still produce from it.

Year

2024

Scope

Standards guide, illustration set, graphic usage rules, photo direction

Extent

Nine sections, story through application

Status

Client work, in use across print, web and trade shows

Voxel sells AI safety software into industrial sites, 250 or so at last count. The product is genuinely deep and the sales deck buried it in text. I audited the material and rebuilt it as a system, one type scale, cards for the comparisons, arguments staged across slides instead of stacked into bullets. Months later their own team extended it into a webinar programme I had nothing to do with. That is the part I am proud of. The hybrid cloud architecture went to an illustrator, and I pushed the isometric through revisions until you could follow it without reading the caption.

Year

2025

Scope

Audit, slide system, information design, illustration direction

Applied

Enterprise sales deck, webinar programme

Status

Client work, in use and extended internally

An annual guide for people selling their homes, produced in house for a 25 agent brokerage and printed to a publisher's schedule. Four kinds of content share one grid and one type scale, from section openers to long form writing to performance reporting. Service pages were the hard part. Information like that usually ends up looking like a brochure somebody dropped inside the book, and here it had to read as part of it.

Year

2019 – 2025

Scope

Grid, type system, layout, photo direction, print production

Extent

108 pages, earlier editions to 200

Status

Published annually, print and digital

A showerhead filter competing in a category that looks like plumbing supply. The client asked for minimal, so the work went into structure and sequence instead. The box opens the way a beauty product opens. The wordmark appears rarely. Instructions are printed into the package rather than onto the insert everyone throws away.

Scope

Positioning, identity, packaging, brand guide

Surfaces

Carton, sleeve, rigid box, insert card

Status

Client work, in production

Campaign and social for a swim and intimates label that sells in drops. Layouts pair the campaign shot with the range, so you can see what is actually for sale. Type stays quiet. The photography is the brand.

Scope

Social content, campaign layouts, marketing collateral

Status

Client work, published

A party card game that runs on nerve. Chrome edged script for the wordmark and a duck with bad manners, drawn by an illustrator I briefed through the full set of poses, one for each card category. The writing and the drawing had to land at the same time.

Scope

Identity, illustration direction, packaging, card system

Set

Eight character poses, eight card categories

Status

Designed for launch, not yet released

Large scale fitness events, and a site that had to feel the way the room sounds. Red on white, condensed caps set on the diagonal, photography of people mid-effort rather than posed. I designed the interface and built the photo treatment the brand ran on, long exposure trails pulled out of the event photography, then directed the development team through the build.

Year

2020

Scope

UI design, photo treatment, build direction

Status

Launched 2020, site still running