JUNION DNA & STRATEGY
Type
Art Direction
Company
Yandex
Link
Team
(AD) Maria Brish
(AD) Tatyana Mikolaevskaya
(CP) Alina Monakhova
(CP) Irina Nikolaeva
(LPM) Elena Landar
Junion is a kids and family brand launched in 2022 — one of the broadest in the category, covering everything from newborn gear to products for early school age. Strollers, car seats, toys, clothing, furniture, creative kits. My role was building the design DNA: a system that could hold such a wide product range together under one recognizable brand. The design work that came out of this system is documented separately in Junion Design & Art Direction page.
IDEA
The brief called for a flexible system, not a rigid one. The range was too broad — different product categories, different user groups, different emotional registers — for a single fixed aesthetic to work across all of it. The starting point was defining the brand's core values and finding where they could actually show up in a product: in form, material, color, texture. From there, I defined a set of moods that could be applied to individual products depending on context. Safety-focused gear for parents reads differently from energetic toys for toddlers — the system needed to hold both without flattening them into the same thing.
PROCESS
Each mood came with its own toolkit: a color palette, a material palette, textures, patterns, and formal principles. The "safe" mood draws on earthier, muted tones, matte finishes, and clean quilted surfaces — communicating reliability without being clinical. The emotional mood opens up to brighter hues, expressive patterns, and more dynamic forms. The tender mood works in pastels and handmade-feeling details. Each set of tools reinforces the mood rather than decorating it. Across all of them, certain things stay fixed: no visual overload, no aggressive color combinations, no gender-coded design — these were explicit decisions, not defaults.
