Hochburg designs the identity for PARK, the renamed Stuttgart club — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Perkins Park has been part of Stuttgart’s nightlife since 1980. In 2026, it took a new name, PARK, along with a programme led by house and techno, more international bookings and a club reconfigured for larger-scale nights and a new audience. Local design studio Hochburg, in a long-standing collaboration with club operator Denis Gugac, was commissioned to create the new identity.

The musical direction and the ambition to book more international artists were settled long before any design work started. “When I took over the club, it was clear that a new logo alone wouldn’t be enough,” Gugac tells us. “I want it to look big. I know we are in Stuttgart, but I wanted to create something that could just as easily exist and be celebrated in Barcelona or Ibiza.” From that brief, the scope grew to cover artist communication, social media, motion and the LED screens inside the club. “What people see before an event should feel like the same world they enter when they walk into PARK,” he adds.

“The programme is diverse and will continue to evolve, so the identity needed to evolve with it rather than define one fixed visual style,” Gugac explains. Hochburg looked outside Stuttgart for its reference points, at international clubs and at the visual cultures around house, techno, fashion and contemporary nightlife.

The reduction from Perkins Park to PARK became the starting point for the identity. Hochburg set the four remaining letters on a tight, almost square grid and kept stripping them back version by version, removing more of the detail that identifies a letter and working on the form and silhouette of the logo as a whole. “The hardest and probably most controversial letter was the ‘P,’” Creative Director Florian Boyd tells us. The result is a mark that keeps the letters inside one shape, sharing forms, lines and negative space and receding behind the overall silhouette – geometry reduced enough to translate into physical applications, from metal objects to clothing. “Eventually we reached a point where we knew the word would no longer be immediately readable at first glance. But once you know what it says, the letters suddenly fall into place,” he continues.

“It became a symbol you decode once and then recognise. This is obviously not something you can or should do with every brand. A logo needs to communicate, and readability is usually an important part of that. But we felt that a club can push those boundaries,” Boyd explains. “Especially today, when AI can generate endless variations of perfectly readable futuristic logos in seconds, we felt there was room to push in the opposite direction. We wanted to create something that asks a little more from the viewer.” It is the part of the identity that stands out most for Gugac, too.

The system organises artist communication, monthly programmes, social assets and event graphics. Photography is largely supplied by the artists, so consistency cannot come from the imagery. Recognition comes instead from the grid, typography, information hierarchy and a layer of fine lines and interface elements that reference timelines, players and DJ equipment. Those elements organise dates, artist names, ticket information and the PARK mark, but can also become visible graphic elements themselves.

Futurist, from Fuego Fonts, carries the headlines and the large-scale messages; its rounded forms and softer edges set against the rigid grid, while Arame, designed by Dimitre Lima, is used mainly at small sizes, where it works almost like a technical annotation. The base is black and white with technical greys, interrupted by pink, blue, red, green and violet. Artists and events often come with their own colours, imagery and visual worlds, and the grids, boxes and graphic elements can pick up those colours. “So in a way, PARK has no colours and all the colours at the same time,” Boyd notes. The imagery that the system crops and arranges on the grid comes from the night – artists, bodies, crowds, trails of light, proximity, blur and movement.

With the programme changing constantly, the system had to keep producing visual content without every asset going back through the studio, so Hochburg built its own tool. It works with almost any source material, from stock footage and pre-made VJ loops to clips shot inside the club. The software processes that material into cuts, transitions and loops, and the PARK mark can react and animate in real time to the sound being played. “The individual lines can react to sound and music, break apart, move, expand and come back together. Sometimes you see the full wordmark, sometimes just fragments of it,” Boyd details. “The logo shouldn’t just sit on top of the club’s visuals. It should become part of them.” Hochburg’s tool also works as a social media content generator, so the club team can make branded content without producing every asset from scratch. For individual events, visual artists can create their own live or pre-recorded visuals, which can be fed directly onto the club’s screens.

“We definitely notice a divide in how the change is perceived,” Gugac reveals. “There are people who have known Perkins Park for decades and have a very strong emotional connection to what the club used to be, even if some of them haven’t actually been inside for years. And then there is a much younger audience that goes out regularly and simply wants to have a great night. Especially for people who have known Perkins Park for many years, the change can feel quite radical. The identity needs to make that transformation visible.”