Titus Kaphar had a fairly direct brief for NXTHVN’s identity: “it needs to look cool on a T-shirt.” There is only so much explaining you can do on a T-shirt. At some point, someone has to want to wear it. An institution gets to put its name on a building. A person gets to decide whether to put it on their body.

NXTHVN brings artist-run studios, performances, coworking, and a residency program together in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood. That is quite a bit of activity for six letters. The identity needed to move between the place, the things happening there, and something you could take away with you.

We started with François Rappo’s Theinhardt and the symmetry of the name, extending the N’s at either end. The wordmark can stretch across a large surface or pull itself back in for stationery. Its edges become a way of dealing with whatever space is available.

Lock several wordmarks together and something less orderly begins to happen. The straight lines build near-psychedelic patterns in black and white. Each name is still doing the same simple thing, but in company they become harder to keep track of. You can read the name, or let the letters turn into a surface. The shirt can have it both ways.