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Design

07Design for research

Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant

Visual identity and consulting for a digital corpus

For the SSSL consortium of three universities, I created the project’s visual identity and was the visual consultant for its online database, the Corpus of Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant.

Role
Postdoctoral researcher; visual identity and visual consulting for the online database
Client
Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant (Universities of Zurich, Bern and Tel Aviv)
Via
Researcher contract
Year
2020–2024
The Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant brand: the red seal-shaped symbol beside the project name, on a dark ground of oval seals.
Context

SSSL continued Othmar Keel’s renowned seals project (1981–2013), which set out to build the Corpus der Stempelsiegel-Amulette aus Palästina/Israel. Directed by Christoph Uehlinger, Silvia Schroer, Stefan Münger and Ido Koch, the project had teams in Zurich, Bern and Tel Aviv.

Problem

The project’s visual identity was fragmented. The three universities involved, each with its own brand, had to appear as one project. And the corpus, previously printed and only in German, had to move conceptually, methodologically and functionally to a digital platform.

What I did

A symbol that coexists

The symbol starts from the impression of a seal from Tel el-Fārʿa South (CSSL no. 53): it recalls the letter “S” and the Egyptian serpent, and its outline takes up the oval shape of stamp seals. With it, the three universities could share one symbol.

Horizontal, on red.
Horizontal, on red.
Vertical, on white.
Vertical, on white.
Cropped symbol, on black.
Cropped symbol, on black.
Cropped symbol, with the institutions.
Cropped symbol, with the institutions.

Stationery and template

Letterhead, business cards and letter and report templates for the three sites, and a presentation template for every project member, used in lectures, courses and conferences.

Stationery in use.
Stationery in use.
Letter, long document and business cards, front and back.
Letter, long document and business cards, front and back.
Presentation template in use.
Presentation template in use.
Inner slides of the presentation template.
Inner slides of the presentation template.

Posters and posts

A3 poster for the final conference. Zurich, 2024.
A3 poster for the final conference. Zurich, 2024.
Story for the workshop “Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ Paradigm”. IOSOT, 2022.
Story for the workshop “Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ Paradigm”. IOSOT, 2022.

The project website

I made the project’s institutional website, levantineseals.org. Built on WordPress, it presents the project, its publications and its team. On the home page, the links to each section are illustrations I made from icons to tell the story of the project, drawing on my research.

levantineseals.org. The full home page.
levantineseals.org. The full home page.

From card file to screen

The database system was built by Prof. Dr. Stefan Münger, who asked me to work on the visual refinement of the platform. Starting from the catalogue cards of the earlier project, and echoing the layout of the printed volumes, I designed a new screen that brings the two worlds together.

The online record. Lachish 1 in CSSL: text in blocks on the left, photographs and drawings on the right, as on the cards and in the printed volumes.
The online record. Lachish 1 in CSSL: text in blocks on the left, photographs and drawings on the right, as on the cards and in the printed volumes.
Advanced search on a laptop and the published record in the browser.
Advanced search on a laptop and the published record in the browser.
Cards from the Fribourg archive. Sheets of 14 × 21 cm: on the older models the photo went on the back; on the newer ones, beside the text, the layout the digital record inherited. Figure from Klein Cardoso, 2023.
Cards from the Fribourg archive. Sheets of 14 × 21 cm: on the older models the photo went on the back; on the newer ones, beside the text, the layout the digital record inherited. Figure from Klein Cardoso, 2023.

Skills

Visual identityInterface design (UI/UX)Presentation designEditorial designInformation design

The same skills in other cases