Polar is its own client at P.A.C., an artisanal bakery in São Paulo — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
P.A.C. is an artisanal bakery in São Paulo with a menu that changes week to week. Polar, Ltda. created its identity to change just as often, across the packaging, ceramics, printed menus and the space itself. The Brazilian design studio has four partners. Two of them – Founders & Creative Directors Bruno Ribeiro and Ralph Mayer – are also partners in the bakery, while the other two are regulars there as well.
“When we started P.A.C., there wasn’t really a brand yet,” Ribeiro tells us. “There was the bakery, the sourdough starter, a space taking shape and a lot of enthusiasm around bread, but none of us had experience running a professional kitchen.” The menu, service and space were also still being worked out, and the identity had to change as they did. “We knew things were going to change a lot in the beginning,” Mayer explains, “so we didn’t want to create something that felt finished too early. The identity needed to be flexible enough to adapt as we learned what P.A.C. was going to become.”
“We don’t really have the distance you would normally have between a studio and a client, so decisions and feedback happen very quickly,” Ribeiro notes. “It also gives us more freedom to test things that might be harder to introduce in a more traditional client relationship.” That closeness lets the identity keep changing. Polar designed all the assets, from uniforms to bathroom signage and counter labels. “Most of it was made in-house and often in response to what we needed at the time,” Mayer details. “That was important to us because it meant we could keep making and changing things as the bakery evolved, instead of having to define everything in advance.”
Polar keeps two typefaces fixed so that everything else can change: Muhittin Güneş’s Gronland and Kyiv Type Foundry’s KTF Rublena. “The identity started with Gronland, a typeface that felt reliable and quiet, but still had some character,” Ribeiro explains. “The two typefaces ended up working in different directions, with Gronland handling the more everyday, structural applications and Rublena bringing more personality and recognition to the identity.” Polar added Rublena later, as the bakery grew. “Rublena gave the identity a face of its own,” Mayer notes. “It has a certain weight and presence that makes something feel like P.A.C. even before you read the name. Typography became one of the main anchors of the identity, more than the logo or the colour palette.”
For four years, Polar has worked with illustrator Beatriz Batisteli on drawings that go from a paper bag to a wall. Her playful and direct linework is plain and open in some cases, while others build it into dense, abstract compositions. Many of them are as much about the people around P.A.C. as about what it sells. “Bia is a close friend and has been around since the beginning,” Ribeiro tells us. “She lives near the bakery and is very much part of the community, so her drawings naturally come from that context.”
Polar designs the weekend menus for a receipt printer. The slips are monochrome, coarse in resolution and on paper with a low opacity, printed on demand and lasting a single weekend. The bakery puts out new breads, pastries and specials every week. “The menus, illustrations and other printed pieces can be different from one week to the next,” Mayer explains, “but they still follow the same overall approach. It feels closer to making a series of small publications than maintaining a fixed set of branded assets.” People take a lot of the menus home with them. “It’s a bit of a problem from the bakery’s point of view, but as designers, we find it pretty amusing,” Ribeiro concludes.