Responses by Bruno Ribeiro and Ralph Mayer; founders, creative directors and partners; Polar, Ltda. and P.A.C.
Background: P.A.C. is a sourdough bakery in São Paulo, and because Polar and P.A.C. share some business partners, this was not a regular client-studio relationship; P.A.C. is a place we are part of as well. So, the identity had to feel like the bakery itself, warm and a little chaotic and full of people. It’s made for the community that gathers there, all ages and styles, drawn in by a favorite loaf, an after-lunch coffee or something worth celebrating. More than anything, we wanted it to carry that sense of belonging, so the whole thing serves the room and the people in it.
Design thinking: We knew things would change constantly, so instead of a fixed system, we built recognition into a few anchors and let everything else stay free. Typography does more work than the logo and the palette; we chose Gronland for its quiet reliability and later KTF Rublena for weight and personality as the bakery grew.
The other anchor is how we print. A lot of the communication runs through a thermal receipt printer, and rather than fighting its limits, we made language from them, letting the coarse resolution, the monochrome and the texture of the paper define the graphics. With those two aspects holding the identity together, the menus and specials can change every week but still read as P.A.C.
Challenges: The hardest part was staying comfortable with an identity that’s never finished. Especially in the beginning, we were adjusting almost in real time to what people were actually buying and asking for, changing things week after week—which is intense when there’s no fixed set of assets to lean on. It pushed us to work more like we were making a series of small publications than maintaining a stable brand and to get comfortable making things that wouldn’t last. As designers, our instinct is usually to make pieces that hold up and repeat cleanly, so letting go of that was the real work.
Favorite details: The receipt printer menus, without a doubt. What we like about them isn’t just the idea but how far we ended up taking it. We put an Epson fiscal printer in a studio full of designers and started making things specifically for it. Working at that resolution is pretty fun because you have to think differently about scale, contrast and composition. And since the slips are quick and cheap to make, they became a good place to experiment. At one point, we even used the thermal rolls to make a frame-by-frame animation.
New lessons: The biggest thing we learned came from the customers. People take our menus home with them, which is a small problem for the bakery but genuinely delightful to us as designers. We never expected pieces made for a single weekend to matter after their use, and seeing people collect them taught us that something temporary can still stick. That really encourages us to keep making looser, quirkier things because we’ve seen they don’t have to be useful or repeatable to be worth making.
Specific project details: Being our own client changed everything about how the project ran. Two of us are also partners at P.A.C., so there was none of the distance you usually have between a studio and a client, and decisions and feedback happened almost immediately. That intimacy gave us the freedom to test things that would be much harder to introduce in a more traditional relationship since we could just try them at the counter and see how they landed. Most of the looser, more experimental parts of the identity came out of exactly that freedom.
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