giovanni borde - Papercuts

Papercuts Agency

Brand Strategy 
Visual Identity 
Verbal Identity
UI / UX Design
Motion graphics

Project Details

Papercuts was created as a new kind of production house, built around the ambition to make work with greater focus, craft and intent.

The challenge was the environment it was entering. Content had become constant. Brands were producing more, platforms were demanding more, and production was increasingly driven by volume and speed. For Papercuts, adding more content to that landscape wasn't enough. The ambition was to create work capable of getting through it.

The name already held the beginning of that idea. A paper cut is small and almost invisible, but incredibly precise. You might barely notice it happen, yet it leaves a mark.

That became a useful way of thinking about the company itself. Papercuts didn't need to compete through scale or noise. It could make its presence felt through work that was sharper, more considered and difficult to ignore.

This gave us the central idea for the brand: BREAK THROUGH THE NOISE.

Identity System

The idea of the cut became the principle behind the identity.

We started looking at cutting as a behaviour rather than simply a graphic gesture. A cut can interrupt something, divide it, reveal what sits underneath, change its meaning or bring two different things together. That gave us a simple action with enough possibilities to build an entire visual language around it.

The production process itself gave us another layer. In the darkroom, images are rarely arrived at in one step. Test strips are exposed, stacked, cropped, covered and revealed until the right image emerges. There was something in that process that felt very close to Papercuts: experimentation with purpose, using interruption and obstruction to find something more precise.

That behaviour became part of the identity. Images, words and graphic elements are cut, stacked, obscured and revealed. Sometimes the cut creates tension. Sometimes it controls what you see. Sometimes it becomes the transition from one piece of content to another.

This also gave the identity a natural relationship with film and production. The system could work through composition, editing and motion, allowing the same idea to move between a static frame and a moving image.

The result is an identity built around one simple behaviour: cutting through to make something worth noticing.