Visual Identity and Website for Experience Architecture Practice

A rational architecture brand built its identity on Surrealism.

A poetic and rational visual identity was created for EXPERIENCE, a Paris-based architecture practice. The project included two custom-drawn typefaces, a new website, and a cohesive system of office materials that balance precision with openness and surprise.

Insights

EXPERIENCE is a Paris-based architecture practice built around an "architecture of reason"—restraint and economy of means—yet its name comes from a Jimi Hendrix song, signaling intensity, curiosity, and freedom.
Atelier Dyakova framed the identity around a tension between Surrealism and rationality, opening the project with Louis Aragon’s line from *Paris Peasant*: "The marvellous is the eruption of contradiction within the real."
The deliverables were unusually complete: two custom-drawn typefaces, a new website, and a full ecosystem of office materials, all meant to stay precise while allowing "lasting surprise."
Sonya Dyakova said her bespoke type process starts with research, then atmosphere, then specific references to places, people, and historical periods; she also described brand identity as "composing a soundtrack for a film."
EXPERIENCE's own reference field — the Rolling Stones, Hendrix, Apollinaire, Ginsberg, Hockney, Lou Reed, Chris Marker — sits behind the identity, giving the brand language a mix of architectural rigour with humour, joy and lightness.