Studio Vuono
Branding, creative direction, and an e-commerce site for a Brooklyn ceramics studio.
the blue-eyed barbarian:
Denys Putilin, Olena Kvitkovska
Sector:
Ceramics Studio
Website:
studiovuono.com
What we did:
Creative Direction
Website Design & Development
Logo
Year:
2025
Fonts:
Messina Sans by Luzi type
Prophet by ABC Dinamo studio
Client
Milja Bannwart is a Finnish-Swiss ceramic artist and industrial designer based in Brooklyn. She grew up between Finland and Berlin, studied industrial design, and worked in product and packaging design in New York for nearly two decades. In 2023, she went back to ceramics and established her studio. Vuono is Finnish for fjord.
Milja works with slip casting, a technique typically used in industrial production to reproduce one shape exactly, many times. She fell in love with it while at Pratt Institute and she uses it to precisely create unique sculptural forms, and launch them as collections. The shapes are artistic objects made with an industrial method.
She had her first collection done and good feedback from clients who visited the studio. Now she wanted to define the brand, set up an online shop, and establish how the whole practice should present itself. The scope covered branding, creative direction for photography, and the website.
The logo
Milja sent photos from her Brooklyn studio, not knowing what I would use. Among them was a used slip-cast mold: a round form with a section removed, leaving an organic shape.
I was looking for a typeface that felt engineered and precise but with the touch of an artist. Prophet, by ABC Dinamo, combines warm calligraphic curves with clean geometry, and the O and the V have a quality that linked directly to what I had seen in the mold photograph. The logo came from there.
The name
Once we had Prophet, the word Vuono in that typeface had a sculptural quality on its own. The letterforms were striking, especially over photography or on branded materials. Adding "Studio" in front made the word longer than Vuono itself and changed the perception. The artistry felt buried. That's how the conversation with Milja started about dropping it.
Creative direction
We made a brief for Milja to photograph the collection. For the website, we decided to cut the product shapes out of their backgrounds. As you scroll the homepage, the sculptural forms appear almost as a collage, floating against white. The cutouts emphasise the sculptural quality of the forms.
The website
The site is an e-commerce platform and a brand introduction at the same time. It opens with the collection shot from inside the studio, moves to e-commerce, then Milja's story, and the artistic references behind the brand. Product pages give each piece room. The layout is logical, almost scholarly, which reflects how Milja thinks. She is also a designer, and we discussed every detail on the site. She understood and engaged with every decision, and by the end she had become genuinely interested in web design and typography.
Messina Sans by Luzi Type handles the website typography. It has the same considered quality as Prophet but with more conventional letterforms, so the body text reads cleanly without competing with the brand mark.
We also developed newsletter templates for different purposes: pop-up store announcements, workshop invitations, collection launches.
Squarespace build
The site runs on Squarespace, and Milja manages it herself. The structure supports adding new collections as her practice evolves.
"I am incredibly pleased with the work of the Blue-Eyed Barbarian in designing my website. Denys is a true visionary who went above and beyond the initial scope, delivering an exceptional site that is not only highly functional and beautiful, but also deeply reflective of my work and my personal story.
The Blue-Eyed Barbarian team provided comprehensive creative brand direction, including logo design, visual content guidelines, and e-commerce design. Their professionalism and thoughtful guidance throughout the entire process were truly outstanding. The final website is a genuine expression of my practice and at the same time a seamless e-commerce platform."
— Milja Bannwart, Vuono