Product Designer
and System Builder

A competition win with no ceiling on scope

Winning the University of Gdańsk's internal design competition in early 2018 was the entry point, not the scope. The university — founded March 20, 1970 through the merger of two institutions, now serving 26,000+ students across 11 faculties and 3 campuses — needed a governed visual identity for its 50th anniversary. The constraint was structural: a relatively young institution carrying over a thousand years of Gdańsk's civic identity, with a maritime motto (in mari via tua — your way in the sea) that ran deeper than its founding date. The system had to carry both. Celebrations were scheduled to open March 20, 2019 — the identity needed to be live a full year before the main anniversary date.

Logo as constitutional document

The mark brought together five specific elements — coat of arms outline with crown, founding year (1970), UG initials, the Gdańsk cross, and the anniversary year (2020) — governed by a strict construction grid. The decision to treat sigil and logotype as inseparable was a governance call: it prevented the mark from fracturing across applications as the system scaled across 3 campuses, 11 faculties, and 1,700 academic staff. The primary palette — navy blue, sky blue, white — was extended with amber and black as controlled complements, each defined by explicit use conditions. The primary typeface, Circe, was formally licensed by the university, giving the system legal continuity across every vendor and department.

Color, type, and the rules that made the system transferable

Color rules were written separately for print and screen — a practical necessity for a system running across Pantone-matched invitations and web-distributed materials simultaneously. Trebuchet MS was specified as the everyday staff typeface, keeping the system usable across the institution without requiring the primary license. The brand book codified every rule, making the identity transferable to vendors and departments without design oversight on each execution — critical at the scale of a university with 26,000 students, multiple faculties, and media patrons including TVP3 and Radio Gdańsk.

When the brief becomes a 900-page book

Work on the anniversary book began over a year before publication — over 400 portrait sittings for 50 significant university figures needed to be shot, edited, and integrated into a consistent layout. The first cover concept, a custom Procreate illustration mapping each decade as a vessel leaving port, was rejected in review; rather than discarding it, I repurposed it across posters, notebooks, and an exterior building banner. The final cover resolved to the 50 portraits with a controlled light blue tint, and every layout decision across the 900 pages — quote treatment, portrait grid, article spacing — was governed, not improvised. The book's promotion was held September 30, 2019 at the Main Library of the University of Gdańsk, alongside the jubilee academic year inauguration.

From maritime illustrations to street campaign

The university's maritime identity — anchored in its motto in mari via tua and its ownership of the research vessel Oceanograf — gave the illustration series its subject matter: four campus landmarks rendered in a vintage paper press technique, debossed onto over 150 high-quality prints by a local studio. These ran alongside merchandise, apparel, and notebooks. Concert materials for the October 15, 2019 anniversary concert at Gdynia Musical Theatre — featuring the UG Academic Choir and folk ensemble "Jantar" performing music spanning five decades — were designed within the same governed system: program, invitations, tickets, and poster.

The identity launched in early 2018 and held without revision through a COVID delay that moved the main anniversary ceremonies from March 2020 to March 2021 — a full three-year run on a single visual system.

A painting with five centuries of unresolved legal status

Hans Memling's The Last Judgment is not a quiet altarpiece. Created around 1468 in Bruges for Florentine banker Angelo Tani, it was seized at sea on April 27, 1473 near Dunkirk — when Gdańsk privateer Paul Beneke attacked a Medici galley, killing 8–13, and took cargo worth 30,000–40,000 florins, including the triptych. Beneke donated it to the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Since then: Tsar Peter I tried to claim it as a "gift," Napoleonic forces transported it to the Louvre, the Soviets seized it during WWII and held it in St. Petersburg until 1956. Today it hangs in the National Museum in Gdańsk — Poland's most important artwork after Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine. In April 2018, the Faculty of History and the Faculty of Law and Administration at the University of Gdańsk organized a scientific conference marking the 545th anniversary of Beneke's act: The Last Judgment of Hans Memling — History, Law, Symbols. My brief was a book cover and a conference identity. What it became was a governing visual system for an academic publishing program.

Three books, one visual language

The series spans three publications, all from Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, all under the same visual identity:

Burzliwe dzieje wielkiej karaweli "Peter von Danzig" — Beata Możejko, 2018, 188 pages. A rigorous primary-source study of the caravel at the center of the painting's arrival in Gdańsk, tracing economic, cultural, and geopolitical dimensions across Northern European waters. This was the first cover and the visual anchor for everything that followed.

Sąd Ostateczny Hansa Memlinga. Losy – prawo – symbole — Kamil Zeidler, Beata Możejko, Jerzy Zajadło, Joanna Kamień, 2019, 304 pages. The conference proceedings — examining the painting's provenance, legal status, symbolism, and relationship to canon law across four authors from two disciplines.

Lekcja anatomii u Hansa Memlinga — Jerzy Jankau, 2019, 156 pages. A plastic surgeon's analysis of the triptych's anatomical accuracy — an interdisciplinary perspective that required the same visual system to hold across a radically different subject matter and author.

The visual identity had to work across history, law, and medical science without fragmenting. Each cover reads as part of a coherent series; each stands as an independent academic object. All three are still sold together as a bundle by UG Press.

A conference identity that spanned two faculties

The April 2018 conference identity extended the series' visual language across printed materials — spanning historians and legal scholars from two distinct faculties with different institutional cultures. The system had to communicate academic authority to both audiences while carrying the gravity of a 550-year dispute about whether a sea seizure constitutes piracy or legitimate caperism.

A research centre built on this foundation

The 2018 conference and its publishing program didn't close — they compounded. In October 2022, the University of Gdańsk formally established the Memling Research Centre, with a mission to continue and promote research on The Last Judgment and its surrounding humanistic questions: restitution, ownership, exhibition, and the painting's place in cultural memory. The Centre's five research areas — Historical, Legal, Cultural, Literary, and Philosophical — map directly onto the interdisciplinary publishing program the visual identity governed from 2018. The system helped give coherent form to a fragmented research agenda before it had an institutional name. All three books are still the MRC's official Book Corner — the covers designed in 2018–2019 are the face of an active research institution today. The MRC operates within the Fahrenheit University Association and the European University of the Seas (SEA-EU) consortium.

An outdated logo is a trust gap, not a taste problem

Sopot is one of Poland's most significant tourist destinations — home to the longest wooden pier in Europe, a major Baltic health resort, and the continent's second-largest song festival. The Sopot Tourist Organization, founded in 1997 and governing 110+ member organisations including hotels, restaurants, museums, and transport companies, commissioned a brand refresh in 2018 because its visual identity had fallen behind the destination itself. The timing was institutional, not just aesthetic: the organisation was officially renamed SOT (Sopot Tourist Organization) on November 2, 2018 — the rebrand and the restructuring happened together. Working alongside Studio Spectro's art direction, the brief was to close the gap with a system durable enough to govern 110+ member relationships and run across print, outdoor, and digital simultaneously.

Four landmarks, one mark

The logo encodes four specific Sopot landmarks — the Lighthouse, the Spa House, the Pier, and the Baltic Sea — into a single geometric mark governed by a square grid. Horizontal and vertical versions were specified from the start, extending the mark's range across applications without compromising its structural integrity. The first concept was selected in review and taken directly into the brand system — the brief was precise enough that the logo didn't need to find itself through iteration.

Color derived from place, not preference

The three-color palette — light blue (summer skies), yellow (sandy beaches), navy blue (Baltic Sea) — was grounded in Sopot's physical environment, giving each color a referent that extended beyond taste. Permissible tints were defined at a 30% ceiling; black and white were specified as auxiliaries only, keeping the palette from fragmenting across vendors and member organisations. The primary typeface, Semplicita Pro, handled scale from body text to outdoor advertising; Now served as the geometric complement for identification applications.

Brand book to Baltic street campaign

The brand book codified every rule for external vendors and city departments — the system had to be transferable across 110+ member organisations without design oversight on every execution. The Sopot Tourist Card extended the identity into a functional product for visitors, redeemable at 30+ partner venues across the city and now available as both a physical card and a mobile app. The street campaign made the identity visible at city scale from early 2019.

A system still governing an active destination

The identity launched in 2019 and has not been replaced. The logo runs across visit.sopot.pl — SOT's official tourism portal — in the header, footer, and all digital communications. The Sopot Tourist Card, one of the original brand deliverables, is still issued to overnight visitors who pay the spa fee, now backed by 30+ partner venues. SOT also operates Sopockie Pamiątki — an online souvenir shop where the identity runs across branded merchandise sold citywide.

In 2024, the Sopot Tourist Organization was named Manager of the Polish Tourist Brand Sopot by the Ministry of Sport and Tourism — a national recognition of Poland's most attractive tourist destinations. The visual identity designed in 2018 is the face of that award today.

A century-old district with no modern visual language

Stare Polesie is one of the oldest districts of Łódź — a city defined by industrial brick, dense cultural history, and a street grid shaped by rural land composition that predates the city itself. The brief was to create a visual identity that named and governed this character: not as nostalgia, but as a system capable of running across signage, print, merchandise, and city-facing communication. Working in a team of five, the design work was led across logo, pattern, and identity applications.

The angle that carried the whole system

The logo's defining stroke is angled — a direct reference to the historical rural land composition of the district, uniquely oriented on the city map. This was not a decorative choice: the angle is the system's structural signature, appearing consistently wherever the identity needs to assert its origin. Black, white, and dark red — the color of Łódź's industrial brick — form the palette. Every element traces back to a physical referent in the district; there are no arbitrary marks in this system.

Architecture as pattern vocabulary

The pattern library was derived from local architectural elements — pulled directly from the physical fabric of the district and systematized for application, not abstracted from it. A set of icons representing the district's key cultural buildings extended the vocabulary further, creating a portable system capable of representing Stare Polesie beyond its own borders. These elements mixed with the core mark to produce a range of print and merchandise outputs governed by the same visual logic.

A living identity across district touchpoints

The identity ran across branded merchandise, printed materials, and a district calendar. Its flexibility came from its architecture — a tight rule set governing mark, pattern, and color allowed varied outputs without drifting from the source material.

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