Skawen

Skawen develops, manufactures and sells ventilation units that save energy in the way buildings exchange their air. When they came to us in 2018, they already had an experienced team and good products. What they lacked was a face that would speak for Skawen in the same way at a trade fair, on the website and on a business card. That became our first task.

Since then we have been at Skawen's side at every stage. The company has grown and today operates in eight countries. Each leap in growth has brought us new work, from the brand refresh to the new website, the videos and the 3D animations.

Arvo Juhkov is the author of Skawen's logo and of all its marketing, and Skawen's marketing still runs through him today. Roman and Aleksandra have also worked on the project, as have the developers Vitalii and Vladimir.

Skawen's mark became a fingerprint whose lines form the letter S. The fingerprint had to say two things at once. Its lines recall air moving through a room, and it is a reminder that the Skawen system can be controlled without leaving home. The mark went on to business cards, letterheads, mugs and wall graphics.

By 2022 Skawen had grown and was opening sales offices in new countries. Every new office meant new people making business cards, presentations and trade fair stands. To make Skawen look the same in every country, the management asked us to refresh the brand and put all the rules into one style book.

We did not throw the mark away. The lines of the fingerprint became calmer and more flowing, and the letter S stayed at their centre. Alongside it came the slogan “Environmentally friendly air handling”, the Futura PT typeface, an airflow pattern and eight colours, each with a meaning of its own.

The style book has 43 pages. It sets out how to use the logo, typeface, colours, pattern, images and icons, with examples that range from business cards to signage, clothing and social media. The fingerprint also lives on in the icons, where every part of the unit is drawn inside a fingerprint. Leaf through the book here or open it as a PDF ↗.

Four years later it was time for a new website. The biggest concern was that very different people come to Skawen's site. One is the chair of a housing association, another is an engineer, and yet another owns a swimming pool. On top of them come developers and dealers from several countries. Each of them arrives with their own building and their own concern, but Skawen's products are technically complex and their names mean nothing to an ordinary buyer. The website had to bring these people and these products together.

So we rebuilt the homepage from scratch and put a solutions centre at its heart. There the visitor first chooses their type of building, whether it is a residential building, a swimming pool, a commercial building, an industrial building or a special project. From there the site leads them to the products that suit exactly that kind of building, and they do not need to know a single product code to get there.

The chair of a housing association does not need to know what heat recovery or a refrigerant is. What matters to them is how much the building will save on heating. That is why we built a calculator for the Skawen Residential page. You enter the number of apartments, the current heating system and the price of heat and electricity. The calculator shows straight away how much heat can be recovered from the building's exhaust air, how large the annual saving is and which version of Skawen Residential suits the building. If the figure catches their interest, they can order a precise calculation from the same place, and the request goes straight to a Skawen representative.

Along with the website, Skawen's printed materials got a new look too. The leaflets for swimming pools and for the Compact units, the technical data sheets and the introduction to the composite casing all use the same design and the same images as the website. So the salesperson at a trade fair speaks the same language that the client has already read on the website.

The website explains well what Skawen does. How the factory works and who builds the units there, however, is better seen with your own eyes. That is why we have also made videos with Skawen. On these, the whole job was in our hands, from the idea and the script to the filming and editing. The first of them was finished in 2020 and introduces Skawen's factory.

Inside, Skawen's units are complex, and the buyer never gets to see what happens under the casing. In a 3D animation we can take the unit apart and show how the air moves, step by step. In 2026 we started a new series that is more precise than the earlier ones. The first to be finished was the Compact Pool HP, which dries and heats the air in swimming pools. Choose a step below and see how warm, humid air travels from the pool hall into the unit, how it is dried and how it goes back into the hall warm.

We made the first animations back in 2019, for the Roto, Recu, Compact Pool and Pool HP units. New animations in the same style for Skawen's other units are in the works now.