TOTAL ART DESIGN + ARCHITECTURE TADA Branding
Total Art Design + Architecture

A joyful identity built on precise geometry.

When architect Patrick Winn, AIA, left Overland Partners in 2015 to launch TADA [Total Art Design + Architecture], the new firm needed an identity as unconventional as its highly creative, highly joyful founder. He told me he wanted “to bring more joy into the world through art, design, architecture and creative collaboration.”

I developed TADA’s broader brand identity based on Patrick’s sketchbook, creating a visual vocabulary of logo, color, and typography, and as that work developed, the idea of creating a custom-width type system came to mind. Built on a shared geometric skeleton, it was a deliberate nod to architecture’s relationship between structure and cladding. Because the letters were constructed rather than simply typeset (this was still in the nascent days of variable-width type, so I did it by hand), the letterforms could flex easily across applications: rendered as clean linework, cut from steel, bent in neon, filled with color, or exposed as an underlying framework. Each character was tuned individually, raising crossbars, narrowing forms and adjusting proportions, so the system felt precise and architectural without becoming rigid.

Over the following decade, TADA grew into an award-winning New Braunfels architecture and design practice, ultimately named the city’s Best Architecture Practice three years running before concluding its professional architectural services at the end of 2024. The TADA identity was built to hold that same tension throughout: architectural discipline with optimism, experimentation and a little exuberance.