X3M — Logo, Singles & Album
Logo, single artwork, and full album design for Hloptsi Z Mista — one of Toronto's best Ukrainian polka rock bands.
Hloptsi Z Mista — 'Guys from the City' — are one of Toronto's best Ukrainian polka rock bands. Blending traditional folk with rock energy, they perform at festivals, community events, and celebrations across Ontario and beyond. The band came with great music and a growing following, but no visual identity to match the quality of what they put on stage.
It began when the band was recording their first album and realised they needed a visual identity to match — a plan that came together with the band through a mutual friend. The work then grew over several years of collaboration: a logo to anchor everything, distinct artwork for three singles, and the full design of two albums — Kompakt Dysk (2021) and Kozatskij Stil (2024) — from streaming covers to physical CD packaging.
Logo
The mark wraps the full band name — in both Ukrainian (Хлопці з міста) and Latin script — around a bold X3M letterform, ringed by a subtle vyshyvanka (Ukrainian embroidery) pattern that nods to the band's roots. The X3M acronym works as a standalone mark wherever the full lockup won't fit, and the hand-built, slightly jagged letterforms mirror the rock-and-roll feel of the band without leaning on literal folk ornamentation. It reads confidently at a streaming thumbnail's scale and anchors everything from the album spine to a festival poster.
Singles
Each single earned its own identity rather than a templated series — I was handed the story behind every track and given free rein to translate it into a cover, with a shared typographic and logo system quietly tying the discography together across streaming thumbnails.
Each cover started from the song itself. Batyar opens with the shout of 'Hloptsi z Mista!' before the beat drops — the track made to kick off a zabava — so its artwork leans into bright, neon party iconography. Vysyt Yabko ('the apple hangs') turns on a folk metaphor — the ripe apple as the right moment to fall in love and marry — which the hand-drawn apple tree makes literal. Amol borrows the name of the well-known herbal tonic: the song follows a young man coping with life's chaos through love, leisure, and a drink, so the cover riffs on that instantly recognisable bottle.
"Quality output whilst keeping the entire iterative design process fun and engaging."
Hloptsi Z Mista (X3M)
Albums
The band's first album, Kompakt Dysk ('Compact Disc'), was built as a physical artefact worth keeping. The X3M mark holds the front; the back lists all ten tracks inside the negative space of the logo's X; and the interior pairs a black-and-white band portrait with a Toronto skyline and the production credits. The entirely monochrome treatment made the most of a small print run while giving the package a quality that outlasts the streaming era.
A second album, Kozatskij Stil ('Cossack Table'), followed in 2024. Its cover trades the monochrome restraint of the debut for warmth — the title hand-lettered and wood-burned into a laid Cossack feast of borscht, salo, and varenyky, with the X3M monogram branded beneath. Nine tracks, framed as a meal to gather around.
