Mari-lena's Portfolio

Project Overview

This poster for twenty one pilots’ “The Contract” distills the song’s existential tension into a typographic labyrinth. More than promotional material, it functions as a visual echo of the lyrics—where sleepless nights and broken promises materialize through deliberate fragmentation and haunting repetition.

Concept & Inspiration

The design mirrors the song’s themes of insomnia and fractured identity:

• Asymmetrical text blocks mimic scattered thoughts during sleepless hours, with phrases like “I don’t sleep much, that’s crazy” appearing both as confession and self-interrogation.
• The recurring line “oh, promises and contracts”—positioned like a refrain—visually echoes the cyclical nature of regret.

Materials & Techniques

• Analog Imperfection: Text appears distressed, as if typed on a worn machine or hastily handwritten, reinforcing themes of mental exhaustion. Smudges and uneven kerning suggest the wear of time.
• Digital Disruption: Certain phrases (e.g., “How’d you know that?”) shift in weight or alignment, mirroring the song’s abrupt dynamic changes. The poster could be screen-printed for tactile grit or rendered digitally to emphasize its surreal duality.

Color Palette & Typography

Monochrome Madness:

• A drained sepia or newsprint yellow dominates, evoking old contracts and sleepless-night lamplight. No vibrant colors distract from the textual unease.
• Typewriter-esque fonts reinforce the “contract” motif, while erratic sizing and spacing mimic erratic thought patterns. The word “The Contract” may loom heavier, like an unshakeable obligation.

Visual Impact

This poster doesn’t just advertise—it unsettles. The disjointed composition forces the eye to jump between phrases, replicating the song’s lyrical disorientation. Like twenty one pilots’ music, the design balances raw emotion with meticulous craft: every misplaced line and repeated phrase feels intentional, a mirror to the band’s signature blend of chaos and control. Held in hands, the texture would whisper of midnight oil and crumpled paper; viewed from afar, it becomes a stark monument to insomnia’s poetry.

Project Overview

This New Year’s greeting card distills the essence of celebration into a bold, minimalist statement. Stripped of excess ornamentation, the design relies on stark typography and spatial tension to convey both joy and renewal—a visual toast to new beginnings.

Design Concept

The card’s power emerges from what it refuses to do. Unlike traditional holiday designs cluttered with clichéd imagery (fireworks, champagne flutes), this piece channels the crisp clarity of January’s first morning. The fractured composition—with each word isolated on its own line—suggests a countdown, each line break acting as a silent “3…2…1…” before the New Year’s arrival.

Materials & Technique

• Physicality: Letterpress printing would emboss the heavy typography into cotton paper, making the greeting tactile as well as visual—the recipient’s fingers tracing the words like a whispered wish.
• Digital Precision: Alternatively, crisp vector typography achieves similar impact for mass production, with the negative space between words becoming as deliberate as the text itself.

Color Palette & Typography

Monochromatic Boldness:

• A single vibrant hue floods the text, symbolizing both the intensity of celebration and the blank slate of the coming year.
• The absence of imagery transforms the card into a Rorschach test; some will see confetti in the spacing, others will feel the quietude of resolution.

Typography as Confetti:
The font choice remains deliberately unspecified in the sample, but would ideally feature:

• Chunky slab serifs for timeless solidity
• Slightly irregular kerning to mimic human handwriting’s warmth
• Variable baselines in “Happy / New / Year!” to suggest joyful movement

Final Thoughts

This card doesn’t shout—it resonates. Left on a mantelpiece, its three words become a poetic mantra rather than disposable seasonal kitsch. The exaggerated negative space serves dual purposes: practical room for handwritten notes, and metaphorical room for the recipient’s own hopes. By reducing the design to its linguistic essence, the piece achieves something rare: a holiday greeting that feels both universal and intensely personal.

Project Overview

This album cover for Bring Me The Horizon reimagines the band’s sonic intensity through a visceral, almost alchemical fusion of organic decay and digital distortion. The design serves as a visual manifesto for their genre-defying sound—where raw, tactile textures collide with glitch-ridden typography to mirror the band’s evolution from metalcore roots to electronic-infused experimentation for their new album called NEX GEN.

Design Concept

The cover thrives on controlled chaos. At its core lies a tension between:

• Organic erosion: The stained, weathered textures evoke a relic unearthed from some post-apocalyptic wasteland, mirroring the band’s themes of societal collapse and rebirth.
• Digital corruption: Fractured typography and pixelated artifacts suggest a file corrupted beyond repair—a metaphor for the band’s deconstruction of musical boundaries.

Color Palette & Typography

Analog Meets Digital:

• The base layer mimics oxidized metal, achieved through scanned textures and manipulated ink bleeds.
• Glitch effects are applied with surgical precision—some areas appear digitally shattered, others smeared like wet ink, creating a dialogue between analog destruction and digital decay.
• The typography undergoes data-moshing, with certain letterforms disintegrating into pixelated noise while others remain eerily intact

Chromatics of Decay:

A monochrome foundation of bruised blacks, concrete grays, and septic yellows dominates, punctuated by sudden flares of neon static—like a dying monitor flickering back to life. This duality reflects the band’s balance between nihilistic lyricism and electronic sound mixed with metal elements.

Typeface:
The specific typeface represents the soundwave of the band.

Visual Impact

Holding this vinyl feels like clutching a artifact from the future’s rubble. The cover doesn’t just represent Bring Me The Horizon’s sound—it emulates it. The textures seem to vibrate with bass-heavy frequencies; the typographic fractures syncopate like a breakdown; even the negative space hums with eerie reverb. Most strikingly, the design rewards physical interaction. Under light, the spot-varnished elements would catch differently than the matte decays, making each vinyl’s aging process unique—a visual echo of how listeners imprint personal meaning onto the music.

Project Overview

The Balance Bite logo reimagines nutritional harmony through a symbiotic fusion of organic symbolism and minimalist design. Created for dietitian Christiana Rizou, the mark translates the philosophy of balanced eating into a visual haiku—where an apple’s wholesome simplicity merges with the eternal dance of Yin and Yang. This is branding as nourishment: a single bite that delivers both aesthetic clarity and conceptual depth.

Design Concept

The logo’s power lies in its dual heartbeat. At its core pulses the universal symbolism of an apple—nature’s original health icon—sliced open to reveal a Yin Yang motif. The swirling halves speak to:

• The equilibrium between science and intuition in dietary guidance
• The interplay of indulgence and discipline
• The fusion of Eastern holistic wisdom with Western nutritional practice

Two delicate leaves crown the composition, their organic curves softening the geometric precision—a nod to the human element in dietary counseling.

Materials & Techniques

Crafted digitally with surgical precision, the logo maintains an artisanal warmth. The circular form operates like a nutritional seal, its clean vectors ensuring scalability from business cards to social media avatars. Strategic negative space in the Yin Yang’s “bite” creates an illusion of depth, as if the logo itself is being consumed—a playful meta-commentary on the brand’s name.

Color Palette & Typography

Four colorways act as seasonal moods for the brand:

• Petrol (#1C6672): The crisp authority of clinical expertise
• Cherry (#9A333F): The vibrancy of passionate food advocacy
• Pastel Orange (#E0A477): Approachable, sunlit nourishment
• Mint Green (#3BA089): The default voice—fresh, trustworthy, alive

Typeface:
Winkly Sans Regular performs a delicate dance—its rounded terminals and open counters mirror the logo’s friendly curves, while the slight quirk in its ‘a’ and ‘e’ glyphs adds just enough personality to avoid sterile professionalism. The lowercase ‘by Christiana Rizou’ in finer weight creates hierarchy without hierarchy, like a chef’s subtle signature on a composed dish.

Potential Applications

• Branding & Identity: Website, business cards, packaging, uniforms
• Marketing Materials: Advertisements, vehicle wraps, digital campaigns
• Digital Presence: App icon, website header, social media branding

Final Thoughts

This is a logo that behaves. In monochrome contexts, the symbolism retains its clarity; in full color, each variant feels like a different facet of nutritional philosophy. The mark’s circular rhythm gives it a talismanic quality—it could equally grace a recipe book or a clinical white paper. Most brilliantly, the “missing bite” (where Yin meets Yang) invites the viewer to complete the image mentally, engaging them in the very act of balance the brand promotes. By wedding ancient symbolism to contemporary minimalism, the design becomes a timeless vessel—one that could gracefully evolve alongside nutritional science itself. It doesn’t just represent balance; it embodies it through every considered curve and intentional void.

Project Overview

This exhibition flyer announces REFLECTIONS, a multidisciplinary showcase uniting graphic design, photography, and visual arts. Striking in its simplicity, the design serves as a conceptual gateway to the event, balancing stark typography with intentional omissions to provoke curiosity. It functions as both an informational piece and an artistic statement, mirroring the exhibition’s experimental ethos.

Concept & Inspiration

The flyer draws power from its contradictions. The rigid monospace typography suggests digital precision, while the intentional “glitch” in the title undermines this perfection—much like how the participating artists (graphic designers, photographers, visual artists) each disrupt and redefine their mediums. The exhibition’s late-night hours (6:00 PM–2:00 AM) are mirrored in the design’s high-contrast black-and-white palette, evoking the liminal space between daylight clarity and nocturnal experimentation. The venue—Marika Hybrid Space in Psiri’s gritty arts district—lends its underground energy to the flyer’s unapologetic minimalism.

Materials & Techniques

Created for both physical and digital realms, the flyer’s design thrives in transition. The absence of imagery turns the paper itself into a canvas, where the stark typography casts shadows like installations in the actual exhibition space. The monospaced font treatment of practical details (date/time/place) recalls the impersonal typography of train schedules or code, subtly questioning how we “schedule” artistic experiences. The triple-hyphen divider serves as both visual break and symbolic bridge between disciplines.

Color Palette & Typography

A study in extremes: the pure black text on white background becomes a literal manifestation of reflection’s duality. The bold, uppercase title weightily anchors the composition, while the narrower monospace details float like footnotes to the main concept. This tension between heavy and light, between presence and absence, mirrors the exhibition’s exploration of how artists interpret “reflection” across mediums.

Visual Impact

This is design as cultural intervention. Posted on Psiri’s weathered walls, the flyer would look equally at home as a gallery piece itself—a meta-commentary on art announcements. The brutal simplicity forces engagement; viewers must complete the word “REFLECTION” in their minds, thus participating in the creative act before even entering the exhibition. By making absence its most powerful element, the flyer perfectly encapsulates the exhibition’s spirit: art exists not just in what’s shown, but in what’s hidden, distorted, or waiting to be discovered. The design’s lasting impression lies in its quiet confidence. Where most event flyers shout, this one whispers—and in doing so, demands to be heard. It demonstrates how radical restraint can be, proving that sometimes the most compelling designs are those that trust their audience to fill in the blanks.

Project Overview

This book presents a systematic exploration of 20th-century Greek art, offering a comprehensive analysis of artistic movements and their influence across mediums such as sculpture, painting, and beyond. Richly illustrated, it invites readers to engage with seminal works while deepening their understanding of how these movements shaped artistic practice. The design balances scholarly rigor with visual storytelling, ensuring accessibility for both art enthusiasts and academics.

Design Concept

Inspired by the dynamism and diversity of 20th-century Greek art, the book’s layout and imagery highlight the interplay between tradition and modernity. The inclusion of high-quality reproductions—ranging from paintings to mixed-media works—serves as a visual anthology, reflecting the era’s experimental spirit. The design subtly mirrors the aesthetic shifts of the period, from bold avant-garde to introspective abstract styles. The moth design (made by me) emerges as a silent motif—fragile yet persistent, echoing the artists who navigated political upheavals and cultural shifts. The book’s layout mirrors this metaphor: pages flutter between stark analytical passages and luminous full-bleed artworks, as if the reader is chasing the same elusive light.

Color Palette & Typography

A neutral backdrop of whites and soft grays allows the vibrant artworks to stand out, with occasional accent colors drawn from key pieces. The typography combines a modern sans-serif for headings (conveying clarity) with a classic serif for body text, bridging contemporary and traditional design sensibilities.

Visual Impact

By marrying scholarly analysis with striking visuals, the book transforms into both a reference and an art object. The deliberate pacing of images and text encourages contemplation, while the cohesive design pays homage to the transformative power of 20th-century Greek art. The book feels alive. Artworks “flutter” across spreads, their sequencing mimicking a moth’s erratic path. Close-up details of brushstrokes or chisel marks echo the intricate veins of wings, inviting readers to linger. The cover—debossed with a barely-there moth silhouette—hints at the unseen forces shaping art history.

Project Overview

This book cover reimagines Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis through a hand-drawn, expressive sketch that captures the haunting, surreal essence of the story. The design aims to visually translate the novel’s themes of alienation and transformation with a raw, emotional approach.

Concept & Inspiration

Inspired by Kafka’s unsettling narrative, the cover centers on an abstract sketch of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, using distorted, insect-like forms to evoke discomfort and curiosity. The rough, textured lines mirror the psychological turmoil of the protagonist and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the novella.

Materials & Techniques

The cover was created by hand, using graphite and ink on textured paper to emphasize the organic, imperfect quality of the illustration. Subtle digital adjustments were applied to enhance contrast and prepare the artwork for print, while preserving the integrity of the original sketch.

Color Palette & Typography

A muted, monochromatic palette in shades of black and grey reinforces the bleak, existential tone of Kafka’s work. The typography features a stark, minimalist serif font, creating a striking contrast with the frenetic energy of the illustration and lending the cover a timeless, literary feel.

Visual Impact

By combining raw, gestural sketching with restrained typographic choices, the cover embodies the tension and unease at the heart of The Metamorphosis, offering a fresh, contemporary interpretation of this classic text.

Project Overview

This poster celebrates the rebellious spirit and iconic style of Vivienne Westwood through a raw, tactile mixed media approach. Designed to capture her punk ethos and avant-garde sensibility, the poster fuses photography, texture, and handwritten elements into a bold visual statement.

Design Concept

Inspired by Westwood’s fearless attitude, the design layers Polaroids showcasing her distinctive clothing and jewelry pieces, evoking the immediacy of backstage moments at a fashion show. The imperfect, analog aesthetic of Polaroids reflects both nostalgia and authenticity—key themes in Westwood’s work.

Signature & Personal Touches

Adding Vivienne’s handwritten signature injects a sense of intimacy and personal connection, while lipstick marks smudged across the layout references both the fierce femininity and provocative edge that define her legacy.

Materials & Techniques

The mixed media composition combines scanned Polaroids, digital collage, and hand-applied lipstick textures. This tactile approach blurs the lines between traditional and digital art, echoing Westwood’s ability to subvert conventions and redefine fashion.

Typography & Layout

Bold, distressed type complements the chaotic yet curated layering of images, embracing Westwood’s philosophy of beautifully controlled anarchy. The asymmetrical composition creates energy, movement, and a sense of raw elegance.

Project Overview

LVL UP! Cafe is a unique coffee shop concept blending a fresh, modern aesthetic with retro gaming vibes. Designed to appeal to a young, urban audience, the brand seeks to stand out from the typical cafes flooding the Greek market by offering something truly distinctive.

Naming & Concept
The name LVL UP! comes from the iconic “level up” phrase used in video games, symbolizing progress—a clever metaphor for how coffee powers us through the day. The cafe’s playful identity speaks directly to gamers and pop-culture enthusiasts.

Logo & Character Design
At the heart of the branding is Ne(r)d, a whimsical ghost character sipping coffee, inspired by nostalgic video game elements. The hand-drawn logo typography adds a dynamic, energetic touch, while the chosen color palette enhances the retro aesthetic.

Color Palette
The key purple shade (#9763A4) was inspired by Gengar from Pokémon, adding a subtle nod to classic gaming culture and reinforcing the brand’s nostalgic undertone.

Font & Illustrations
The font Eustranche complements the playful yet edgy feel of the brand, and custom illustrations bring the character of Ne(r)d to life across the visual identity.

Final Thoughts

This redesign successfully merges modern aesthetics with brand identity, making ACS stand out in the competitive courier industry. The bold, high-energy design ensures instant recognition, positioning ACS as a forward-thinking and high-speed service provider.

More info about this project here :

ACS Logo Redesign

Project Overview

ACS is a well-known courier and logistics service provider, recognized for its speed and reliability. The goal of this redesign was to create a fresh, modern, and dynamic identity that reinforces ACS’s reputation as a fast and efficient delivery service.

Design Concept

The redesigned logo is inspired by the origami bird, symbolizing speed, precision, and agility. The geometric approach not only modernizes the brand but also conveys a sense of structure and trustworthiness, which are key attributes of a successful courier service.

Key Design Elements

• Origami Bird Symbol: Represents speed, efficiency, and movement, reflecting the company’s core service values.
• Sharp Geometric Lines: Enhance the perception of motion and reliability.
• Red and Dark Red Color Scheme: Red evokes urgency and action, making it a perfect choice for a delivery service. The darker red tones add depth and contrast.
• Bold Typography: The “ACS” text is designed in a sleek, modern font that conveys professionalism and futuristic appeal.

Suitability for ACS

This logo effectively communicates the fast, reliable, and efficient nature of ACS. The dynamic posture of the bird suggests movement and speed, while the structured geometric elements reinforce a sense of organization and trust.

Potential Applications

• Branding & Identity: Website, business cards, packaging, uniforms
• Marketing Materials: Advertisements, vehicle wraps, digital campaigns
• Digital Presence: App icon, website header, social media branding

Final Thoughts

This redesign successfully merges modern aesthetics with brand identity, making ACS stand out in the competitive courier industry. The bold, high-energy design ensures instant recognition, positioning ACS as a forward-thinking and high-speed service provider.