Project
Tolk
Identity
Stationery
2025
The brief
Tolk is 22 conference interpreters in Malmö who work between Swedish, Danish, English, German and Arabic for courts, hospitals and the councils of the Öresund region. They formed the cooperative in 2021 to stop working through agencies, and kept the agencies’ habits: letters in Word, a logo of two speech bubbles, cards nobody remembered. Clients booked the interpreter they had met, not Tolk, so when that person was busy the job went elsewhere. The cooperative wanted to be booked by name, starting with a tender for the regional courts in spring 2025.
The idea
An interpreter carries a sentence from one language into another, and the best ones disappear while doing it. So the identity is quiet: one ultramarine, a warm paper, and a wordmark whose o is split down the middle. Orange marks the second language wherever it appears, on the cards, the letters and the badges interpreters wear in the booth.
Cards
Ultramarine on the front with the wordmark and nothing else. On the back: the interpreter’s name, number and language pairs in orange, the one thing a client needs to book them again.
Letters
Letters, quotes and invoices go out on warm white paper with an ultramarine edge, in envelopes lined with rows of split circles. The interpreters write their own letters in a Word template we set up, so they look right without a designer.
In the booth
Every interpreter wears a badge with their language pair, large enough to read from the back of a courtroom, so listeners know whose voice is in their headphones.
Notebooks
Interpreters note in symbols while they listen. Tolk’s orange notebooks are ruled in narrow columns for exactly that, one per day of a conference, and every new member gets a stack.
What changed
The identity was ready for the courts tender in April 2025, and Tolk won four of its five lots. Clients now ask for Tolk rather than for one interpreter, and when that interpreter is booked, the job stays in the cooperative.
Credits
Okapi: Tomás Reis (lead designer), Beatriz Correia (wordmark), Ana Pires (print)
Tolk: Johan Lind (chair), Yasmin Haddad (bookings)
With: printed in Malmö on Munken Pure; photography by Rafael Costa
