Hye turns four

Today we celebrate 4 years of Hye and almost 10 years of working together as a branding duo. Apparently, it’s not bad to couple a strategist with a designer. Here’s a quick and honest review of the good things we’ve accomplished in this rather short period of time.

Grow

We founded Hye with the naive dream that we could transform the public space around us into a more beautiful place. Reality showed us that Romania is not there yet, ready to settle and do everything right. However, we haven’t given up and gave our best to grow in this direction, even if it meant sacrificing our time.

The project we did for the 2016 Ministry of Environment continued in 2017 with the popular series about Bucharest and our later attempt at Oradea’s identity. In the autumn of 2018, we started working pro-bono for PLUS, the rising political party and ally of USR. This experience gave us some hope that our dream might come true in the near future.

We tried discussing with a few museums too, such as MNAC — the national museum of contemporary art, MNAR — the national museum of art, and Antipa — the national museum of natural history. No collaborations are going on yet, we only have some stories to tell, but anything is possible, right?

Focus

Although we keep thinking about extending to new areas, outside the service zone, we’ve stayed true to branding so far. It’s been our focus since our first jobs, about 17 years ago for Alin and almost 10 for Laura. That’s not easy to achieve, especially when you start a creative business in the unnamed crisis we are all going through.

In these last four years, we managed to extend Hye’s portfolio from zero to thirteen, including the latest Upgrade 100. All of them are full branding or rebranding projects that we are happy with. Ten of them are related to tech in a way or another. Bogdan Dumitrache, our former partner and colleague is to be thanked for this progress as well.

We started getting into more detail with every project, doing things we didn’t use to do before. UI/UX is something we had to learn from scratch and integrate into our flow. There’s also the attention we give to professional fonts, encouraging clients to appreciate a well-crafted type and pay for the work of the best type foundries on the planet.

Fraternize

Another thing we’ve been trying to do is socialize with our peers and be open about all kinds of collaborations. There’s hopefully enough fish in the sea for everyone and much to learn from one other, as long as we don’t see each other as competition.

We made friends with Pan Identity in Madrid last year, who were kind enough to welcome us in their lovely studio, although we were basically strangers. We got the chance to be walked through their most recent projects and show some of ours. It's always interesting to observe different approaches to branding and design work.

Finally, we’re happy with all the people we get to meet at nice local events like the monthly Design Meetup or Type Thursday in Bucharest.

That’s all, folks!