Arkadë Studio’s identity for Camelot tells a legend instead of a view — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Camelot is a 26-room hotel in Ksamil located on the Albanian Riviera. Arkadë Studio was tasked with creating its identity to match the iconic nature of the name without being overly cartoonish. The remit that the Tirana-based multidisciplinary studio took on covers the mark, wider visual language, collateral and applied details across the guest experience.

“Camelot is a big word to put on a building. It carries expectations,” explains Gabriel Memsuri from the hotel. “Our worry was that the design would either run away from the mythology entirely, which would make the name feel random, or lean into it too hard and make us look like a themed resort. We needed the middle ground: confident, grounded, with just enough myth to earn the name.”

“Ksamil already has its postcard. We didn’t want to compete with it, so we didn’t,” Arkadë Studio’s Co-founders Eduina Jaupi and Gea Madhi tell us. “Ksamil is full of places that look the same: blue and white, beach chairs, Mediterranean vibes. We wanted to signal that Camelot is a destination, something worth travelling for,” Memsuri details. The beach destination is often marketed as the ‘Maldives of Europe,’ but the coastline appears only in the blue of a wax seal and in the language of arrival. “Once you’re telling a legend instead of selling a view, you’re allowed to be poetic and literary,” Jaupi and Madhi note.

Arkadë Studio drew the heraldic mark by hand – creating an armoured rider inside a frame. “It’s what makes this feel like something we found, not something we made,” Jaupi and Madhi explain. The linework suits a wax stamp, an emboss in paper and an engraving in metal. “A vector mark would look correct but feel cold, arriving fully formed with nothing behind it, while this one carries weight and age, like it’s been here the whole time and we simply uncovered it,” Jaupi and Madhi continue. “Unexpected, yes. But it felt true. When we saw the knight, we recognised it immediately as ours. It felt built to last,” Memsuri tells us.

The wordmark is set in Caslon, which is sharp and sits cohesively beside the knight. Capitalics Warsaw Type Foundry’s Brygada 1918, which is slightly condensed and a little editorial, is the typeface for the surrounding text, and ParaType’s irregular Pushkin is used for the handwritten moments. “If we’d added even one more ‘old’ touch, the whole thing would’ve tipped over into feeling stuck in the past instead of just referencing it,” Jaupi and Madhi detail. Between them, the three typefaces give “formality, function and intimacy without any of them over-pronouncing themselves,” Jaupi and Madhi explain. The palette is earth and sea, and the duo note that “brown and blue isn’t a combination anyone associates with medieval branding, so it reads as considered rather than themed.” It is warm cream, deep brown, stone grey and a blue that comes from the Ionian Sea – with no gold, burgundy or jewel tones.

The wax seal is placed on confirmation letters and welcome packages for guests. “A seal earns its authority by not being everywhere,” Jaupi and Madhi explain. The full mark appears only in wax, in an emboss and above the door, where the signage uses it at scale. Everywhere else, the mark is reduced to a fragment, letter or nothing at all. The room key has the line ‘The legend begins,’ and a hand-drawn castle illustration sits inside a welcome folder. “You see the knight; you read the name; you feel like you’ve arrived somewhere with a history, even if you know it just opened,” Memsuri concludes.