Vegapunk: an old-school DJ rebrands for the streaming era

Vegapunk (formerly known as Rage) is a hip-hop DJ based in Salonica, Greece. He has been in the scene for more than 15 years, and he has been focusing on doing DJ sets for hip-hop events in bars and clubs.

After such a long time in action, DJ Constantinos Chatzaridis started planning a shift to his brand. The Greek financial crisis has had an obvious effect on Salonica’s nightlife, and venues offering solid hip hop music events are becoming rarer – venue managers decide to offer more mainstream music to their customer, and mitigate risk.

On the other side, technology now is much, much different than it was when our client was starting out. The world wide web has brought people closer together, the musical landscape has become global, and the emergence of high-speed internet means that streaming music is not only achievable, but it has become the dominant way that people consume media right now. There’s nothing stopping a person in Japan or Brasil listening to the sets of a DJ based in Greece.

This is why our client decided to do a full rebrand, change his stage name from Rage to Vegapunk, and focus more on having an online presence, spend more time working on mixtapes that could be released online, instead of relying mainly on spearheading local events.

The first challenge was the complete lack of a standard visual identity, logo, colours, typography. Without such consistency, it’s harder to instill brand awareness and loyalty. Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all have sections that can be used for branded content – these need to be used in the most strategic way, to make sure that the audience identify with the brand, its values and messaging.

More than that, Rage, the previous stage name, didn’t represent our client’s growth in the industry either; during all these years, he had become a true scholar of the urban sound, building a massive musical collection and delving deep into his curation process.

To address these issues, we worked together in a Discovery workshop that helped us distill the values that the brand needed to embrace, understand the audience and identify any issues that we would need to address with our design. We created an airtight brand statement, and started outlining a strategy that would result in hitting our targets for brand awareness and proper positioning of our client in the market.

We reached a solution that combines Vegapunk’s connection to urban culture with his vast experience and extended musical collection – our proposed logo attracts the attention of the viewers, and it still conveys the message of a complex, almost scientific approach to hip hop music. On the same time, the logo’s form is, obviously, shaped like a V, but it also hints at the DJ’s connection with The Antilopes, a musical collective that he’s a part of, as reassurance to his existing fans that he’s still active in the community. The typeface we used for the wordmark is DIN, a typeface that is instantly familiar to European audiences – it evokes the correct amount of “street” and “urban” in them, making sure our messaging gets across.

We were very relieved to hear that this preparation work helped us nail these core ideas from the first try – we had to combine two of our proposed directions because our client fell in love with the colours of one, and design elements of the other, and with just a minor tweak, we were ready to conquer the new frontiers that the Vegapunk brand is set for conquering.

With this new identity system, Vegapunk has all the tools he needs to increase brand recognition, solidify his already large following, and open fresh avenues of marketing, create merchandise that looks awesome, and bring more and more people to the eclectic hip hop tribe.