This Machine Creates Joy
Feb 11, 2025 – by Makenzie Beyer
Some partnerships were simply built to last.
When the good folks over at Colossal decided to launch a gallery in the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago, we knew it was the perfect opportunity to reconnect.
If you recall, we partnered with thisiscolossal.com earlier last year to give them a brand refresh and website uplift.
After a decade-long dream, Joy Machine was finally born as a gallery and community space meant to uplift artists and community members and to reimagine what art could be in Chicago.
Before we dive in—
A quick history lesson.
The Color Club is a significant piece of the Chicago arts community’s history. Originally built in 1922, the Color Club used to host the Chicago International Order of Vikings until it was reimagined as The Latvian Community Center and Folk Art Museum in 1958.
The Color Club now neighbors another community arts space, Lot’sa, and they recently opened an ice cream counter hosted by puppets called The Sugar Hole.
After scouring storefronts, office spaces, warehouses, studios, and several other locations, Christopher and Grace landed on The Color Club because of its true community aspect.
“It’s a really lively creative community, which felt like the right fit for Joy Machine’s programming.”
— Grace Ebert, co-founder of Joy Machine
Discovery—
This wasn’t our first rodeo together.
Because of our previous collaboration, the Joy Machine team was ready to hit the ground running, kicking off discovery and visual inspiration in one go. We began with a written analysis aimed to discover who Joy Machine might be as a person, a friend, and member of the community.
We asked questions about Joy Machine’s favorite bands and museums to attend, what kind of landscape Joy Machine might be, and other abstract prompts to get us grounded in the world that the gallery itself was looking to create.
From there, we dove right into an expedited design process.
Visual Inspiration & Visual Identity—
Options, options, options. Similarly to our run with Colossal, we explored several inspirations of type and logo direction for Joy Machine’s design system.
From geometric to bouncy and bubbly, retro to hand drawn and expressive, and some more subtly mechanical typefaces that ended up taking the cake, we ultimately wound up with six distinct directions to narrow down before our first round of design. Each direction explored opportunities to include icons and imagery in the main logomark.
Of all the options we explored, Christopher and Grace found themselves most surprisingly drawn to an unconventional sans-serif with variable corners and a slightly industrial feel. The machined quality of the letters offered a tactile and distinctive personality to the identity, and gave our designers room to play with a vintage-inspired stacked logo design and something a little more geometric and playful.
We narrowed down our design exploration into two distinct options:
Direction 1 seemed like an obvious choice, as it responded closely to initial feedback we gathered during earlier discussions. Direction 2, however, elicited a much more inspired response from Christopher and Grace.
Because Joy Machine’s purpose is to amplify art, they wanted to keep the color palette pretty neutral, yet playful and energetic. This would keep digital and physical brand materials nice and clean, much like the stark white walls of a gallery hall.
We explored a lighter brown as a core brand color, as well as muted tones of pink, purple and orange as possible accents. After some back and forth, we ultimately landed on purple as the design system’s core accent.
Christopher was right on the mark when he said that the purple we chose reminded him of a mimeograph, another joy machine in and of itself.
Design Sprint—
After nailing down a design direction, we dove right into production. Key materials for the gallery’s launch included custom business cards with a foil-stamped emboss and square exhibition flyers to pass out to visitors.
What’s Next—
Catch Joy Machine’s inaugural exhibit, ‘Light Preserver,’ on February 21, 2025, where artists Moises Salazar, David Heo, Liz Flores, and more are on display.
‘Light Preserver’ came from a desire to open Joy Machine with a show that shared the ethos of the gallery. All nine artists have been previously featured on the Colossal website.
