What's with the chairs?
Marketing agency websites all look the same — same Inter typeface, same purple gradients, same stock photos of people in conference rooms. We wanted a visual identity that was specific to who we are. Kuration is a Canadian agency, but our founder now spends much of his time in Brazil — and Brazilian modernist design has a discipline we admire. Geometric, restrained, but warm. The chairs are watermarks, not decoration. They're a signal that we think about the work the same way those designers thought about their work: form follows function, every element earns its place, and the result should feel inevitable rather than fashionable.
The chairs were chosen carefully. Brazilian modernism produced furniture of unusual depth — rich materials, simple form, comfort that comes from craft rather than padding, and soul that survives decades. The work we do is held to the same four tests. Rich data underneath. Simple strategy on top. Comfort with hard conversations and harder numbers. And — saying this carefully — soul, of the kind that comes from practicing a craft for a long time.
Five Brazilian modernist chairs, each appearing once.
Brazilian modernism produced some of the great unsung furniture of the 20th century. Sergio Rodrigues, Joaquim Tenreiro, Oscar Niemeyer, Lina Bo Bardi, Jorge Zalszupin — designers whose work is sold at auction now for tens of thousands of dollars, but whose names almost no one outside the design world knows.
Each section of this site features one of their pieces, drawn as a silhouette and used as a quiet watermark behind the type. No section names them. They're meant to be felt, not announced.
- 01 Lounger In the spirit of Brazilian modernism, c. 1955 Hello
- 02 Mole armchair Sergio Rodrigues, 1957 Philosophy
- 03 Strap chair In the spirit of Joaquim Tenreiro, c. 1947 How we work
- 04 Slatted rocker Brazilian modernist tradition, c. 1960 Practice
- 05 Side-view lounger Brazilian modernist tradition, c. 1960 Industries
Two typefaces, no exceptions.
The Kuration wordmark is set in a wide, geometric, slightly retro-futurist sans. The site's display type echoes that voice. Body copy gets out of the way and lets you read.
- Saira A geometric sans by Omnibus-Type. Used for every headline, label, and navigation element on the site. Echoes the rounded, slightly retro character of the Kuration wordmark.
- Inter A neutral grotesque by Rasmus Andersson. Used exclusively for body copy. The quiet voice that lets the loud one breathe.
A four-tone palette, drawn from Brazilian modernism.
The brand orange is the spine. The other tones — paper, dark, green, petrol — are the supporting cast. Every section uses the same four colors in different combinations, the way Athos Bulcão's tile murals in Brasília reuse a fixed set of glazes across hundreds of compositions.
- Orange The brand color, drawn from the Kuration wordmark. Used as accent — every section has a moment of it. The CTAs, the italic emphasis words, the section markers.
- Warm dark Closer to the dark olive of a 1962 Verve sleeve than to pure black. The ground for the hero, the story moment, and the footer.
- Warm paper The cream of an aged poster. The ground for the editorial sections — philosophy, practice, industries — where reading happens.
- Tile green A saturated mid-tone with a hint of yellow. Verdigris on copper. Appears once, as the ground for the Approach section.
- Petrol teal Cooler than the green, more formal. Appears once, as the ground for the Story section, where measurement is the subject.
Static, fast, plain.
The site is a single static HTML file. No CMS. No build pipeline. No JavaScript framework. Hosted on Netlify with a single serverless function for live weather. The blog is Markdown files in a Git repo. The whole thing loads in under a second on a slow connection.
Built in collaboration with Claude.
Toronto + Belo Horizonte
Est. 2014