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Amar Elkaz
Brand designer helping founders build identities that scale.
New to Contra
Amar is ready for their next project!
Print is not dead. It's just raising the bar.
Canvas Magazine (Summer 2026, Issue AB) is an independent editorial publication built around art, culture, style, and inspiration. The brief was clear: design a print magazine that could hold its own on a shelf next to Kinfolk and Architectural Digest — while speaking to a completely different audience.
The design direction leans into controlled chaos. Raw, expressive artwork by Art by Bart anchors the visual identity, with a high-contrast black editorial system built around it. Rather than competing with the cover art, the typography works with it — oversized masthead, bold section headers, and a tight three-color palette (white, gold, red) that gives structure without softening the energy.
Key design decisions:
Cover system: Full-bleed artwork with a layered typographic hierarchy — masthead, feature callouts, and badges coexist without crowding
Interior spreads: "Beyond the Lines" feature uses an asymmetric layout to mirror the editorial content — breaking the grid where the story calls for it
Newsstand positioning: Designed to command attention in-context, not just in isolation. The cover reads at distance and up close
The result is a magazine identity that looks like it belongs in culture, not just on a shelf.
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Custom lettering mark for Kenny D, an electronic music artist rooted in high energy and urban culture.
The Brief
Kenny D needed a mark that could hold its own across stages, merchandise, and digital — something instantly recognizable without relying on color or complexity.
The Approach
The wordmark is built entirely from custom letterforms, engineered so the negative space collapses into a single unified shape — a diamond silhouette with directional tension. Every cut and angle references the sharp, kinetic energy of electronic music. Nothing is borrowed from existing typefaces.
The system scales across three expressions:
Wordmark — full name lockup for primary use
Emblem — wordmark contained within the diamond form, optimized for embroidery and print
Icon — reduced mark for app icons, stickers, and small-format applications
The Result
A brand mark that works as hard as the music behind it — built for merch drops, festival visuals, and everything in between.
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Naughty Palettes Design needed a brand identity that matched its energy — bold, expressive, and impossible to ignore.
The mark is built around a flame character: a mischievous face embedded within fire, communicating passion, creativity, and a design sensibility that doesn't play it safe. The gradient moves from deep red (#FF1E00) through orange (#FF7A00) to yellow (#FFE600) — a deliberate progression that mirrors the intensity of the creative process from ignition to output.
Typography reinforces the brand personality. The custom-style wordmark is chunky, confident, and carries a streetwear-adjacent edge — sitting in contrast to the "Design" sub-brand treatment, which grounds the playfulness with something more structured.
The identity system scales cleanly across touchpoints. Business cards use the flame curve as a layout device, dividing the card into a branded front and clean reverse. Applied to merchandise — a black cap — the icon holds its own without the wordmark, proving the mark has the strength to function as a standalone asset.
Three words. One direction: Creative. Bold. Impactful.
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Voices of Resilience is an Indigenous-led podcast brand built on the belief that storytelling is resistance. The identity needed to reflect the weight of that — not through decoration, but through deliberate design decisions rooted in Indigenous visual culture and symbolism.
The logomark sits at the center of the system. A stylized 'V' and 'R' locked inside a circular form — the outer ring representing community, continuity, and the generational cycle of storytelling. The forms were drawn to be intentionally minimal, honoring the diversity of Indigenous cultures rather than borrowing from any single tradition. The result is a mark that holds space for many, not one.
The wordmark extends that tension between strength and softness — a bold, structured typographic treatment carrying embedded logomarks within the letterforms themselves. Applied across podcast cover art, broadcast, and merchandise, the system is built to travel. Grounded in research, shaped through collaboration, and designed to amplify voices that have always been here.
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Rootline is a conceptual urban farming and agritech brand built as a personal branding and design practice project.
The brand positions itself at the intersection of sustainability, technology, and community — growing fresh, local produce in city environments through smart, IoT-enabled farming systems.
What was designed:
Logo and mascot mark (carrot cluster icon)
Brand identity across multiple touchpoints: t-shirt, snapback hat, enamel pin, business cards
Website homepage layout
Brand poster / campaign collateral
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