Leonardo is the largest Russian chain of art supplies stores with more than 100 stores in Russia and several stores in Belarus and Kazakhstan. For our semester project at HSE Art and Design School we were given the task to give a rebranding to an existing design of Leonardo.

Before we even started to think about the design, we needed to brief ourselves. And during that process we came to the conclusion that current branding doesn’t convey the fact that Leonardo stores are the only stores in the country that sell a wide range of goods for various creative hobbies at different prices. We also made an observation that Leonardo doesn’t have consistency in their visual language. The design is not the same across their platforms of communication with customers.
We noticed that these stores are always well organized and have good navigation system which gave us the idea that Leonardo is a place where you can find anything very easily, because everything has its own section. Considering everything above, we decided to build new corporate identity on the new brand essence – “artists carry box”.

The main elements of the new design are vector illustrations representing different creative hobbies whether it is painting, embroidery, knitting, calligraphy, origami, etc. Each item has “its own place” and was purposefully put inside the rectangle. Such visual solution perfectly illustrates the structure of artists carry box, which can contain many items from different areas of creativity that can easily be moved around and reorganized. The color palette was also chosen in a way that would symbolize the artsy nature of Leonardo stores.