Renell Medrano cut her teeth as a photographer in the Bronx and quickly became a household name in the creative industry, photographing some of the biggest names in culture from Kendrick Lamar to Jay-Z to Serena Williams. Being the creative force that she is, Medrano moved on to become a filmmaker, product designer, and in 2021, the co-founder of Ice Studios, a creative community with bases in London and New York.

Alongside talent manager, Jess Moloney, Ice Studios was built to represent a growing family of multidisciplinary and global artists. With a strong collective of artists engaged across multiple practices, they strive to support the varying voices facilitating creative work that speaks to a global audience.

In the fall of 2021, Ice Studios was in the midst of launching this creative community. In need of a brand identity and website, they reached out to SSS.

SSS developed the brand identity including wordmarks, logos, and collateral, which were applied across social, merchandise, and web. Inspired by the ‘ice’ moniker, the brand identity was based on the concept of a thermometer and how the volume of the liquid changes depending on the temperature.

As part of the identity, the logo sat atop abstract thermometer lines and shapeshifted based on the actual temperature of a specific location. When designing and developing the website, which heroed the artists and creatives on the roster, SSS incorporated this mechanism to visually represent the two Ice Studios bases—New York and London. When a visitor hovered over either location, the spacing of the thermometer lines would shift in real-time.

SSS also developed Instagram and merchandise wordmarks based on the idea of reading text through melting ice, resulting in a blurred or distorted logo.