Late last year, the then newly-launched Centre for Medieval Arts & Rituals (CeMAR), the research centre that houses NetMAR, commissioned the multi-award winner Cypriot graphic designer Nasia Demetriou to come up with a logo and a brand identity for the Centre. The brief was for a logo that would be daring and pick the viewer’s curiosity and which would visually represent the workings of an academic research centre interested in the overlap between medieval arts and rituals (medievalism understood as broadly as possible).

Drawing on the famous Ravenna mosaics, specifically on a detail of an Empress Theodora mosaic from the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, the logo Nasia proposed brings the famous Byzantine Empress forward into the twenty-first century. Her face is theatrical, signalling that the centre is interested in arts and rituals, which are performative phenomena. Her spectacular crown jewels retain all their splendour but now in cleaner lines. The client wanted to stress that the middle ages is something we are still discovering, a period never complete, which is why we only see half of Theodora’s head.

We are proud and delighted that CeMAR’s logo won a prestigious Pygmalion Award (bronze) at this year’s Cyprus Creative Club best design competition.

Learn more about the award:

http://thecypruscreativeclub.org/2021-bronze/?fbclid=IwAR0FJW5BJZ76TSZsQV9W8emKKbFZbjnuNG8IJ6fHygloa-tWnIqpXWf6suY