Isle of Wight Tomatoes by B&B Studio

Having grown up near Portsmouth, the Isle of Wight carries a certain resonance, though perhaps unfairly. Aged around 14, when getting served in off licences/particularly lax pubs wasn’t always a given, we’d sometimes pass the time watching the IoW ferry. It felt rather bleak, and somehow a bit futile, just bobbing back and forth between two destinations (Southampton and Cowes)...

Olympic Museum by Studio Blackburn

Few things have a design legacy quite like the Olympics: it’s hard to think of another event or organisation that has both a history spanning more than 120 years (the first modern Olympics’ was in 1896), and a distinct graphic identity each time it takes place. Since every Games has its own unique ‘emblem’ logomark device, the events become sort...

Sustana by Collins

For non-design nuts or print nerds, paper might seem pretty high up in the scale of banality and boringness. That’s likely the reason that the Wernham Hogg paper company was the setting of The Office: paper, and Slough, formed an easy sitcom shorthand for all that was unremarkable, trivial, and emphatically dry. But in fact, there’s a lot more to...

Jaffa by Earthling

This took me probably longer than it should have to get my head around, but bear with me: Jaffa oranges – also known as Shamouti oranges in Arabic – are a specific variety of orange cultivated in Israel, Palestine, Cyprus, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey, known for their relatively few seeds and tough skin. These qualities make them especially...

BP&O Voices

Rich Baird on Design History: CBC by Burton Kramer, 1974

The story of Burton Kramer’s logo for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation....

Chyna Club by Bibliothèque

Over the past few decades, high-street menu-scribbler Wagamama has become a rare beacon of actually-very-nice-food among a sea of uninspiring spicy chicken, Giraffes, and Five Guys (arguably, simply too many guys). It turns out Wagamama has some pretty big-name siblings: Mayfair’s Michelin starred, celebrity-beloved Hakkasan; Thai stalwart Busaba; Cantonese eaterie Yauatcha; and Turkish restaurant chain Yamabahce all sit within the...

Superkeen by B&B Studio

There has never been more awareness of allergens and inflammatory ingredients, with lupins and sulphites now on the mainstream radar alongside common culprits like gluten and dairy. At the same time, nostalgia and anemoia (‘a feeling of yearning for a past that you never experienced’) have become driving forces shaping contemporary tastes. Direct-to-consumer cereals neatly bridge a gap in this...

Sendwave by DesignStudio

The  concepts of ‘money transfer’ and ‘community’ don’t immediately seem to go hand in hand: the former feels cold, slightly dry, potentially confusing and rather literally transactional; the latter is all cuddly and feelings and people-y. But uniting these two seemingly disparate worlds is exactly what DesignStudio did recently in its rebranding of Sendwave, a digital platform offering money transfers...

The Dinner Ladies by Universal Favourite

‘Dinner ladies’ doesn’t have the most glamorous connotations in England – depending on your experience at school, it likely conjures up memories of scoops of greying, tepid mash-adjacent slop unceremoniously plopped onto a plate; something to do with turkey dinosaurs; a troop of formidable but visibly jaded people responsible for making every school smell like on-the-turn cottage pie from around...

West Loop by Landor

The official blurb that surrounds Chicago’s West Loop area is that it’s the city’s ‘hottest neighbourhood… a foodie mecca’, according to Choose Chicago, a ‘cultural powerhouse’, in the words of Landor, which recently created its new brand identity. Having never been to West Loop, or even Chicago, it’s hard to get a grasp of what this all really means. Such...

House of Reptile by Studio Gruhl

It’s not often that BP&O covers record label design. Unlike sectors such as fintech or FMCG, record labels naturally lend themselves to the more creative side of design and branding – they have far more niche audiences, and usually don’t have to work as hard as something aimed at the supermarket shelf to stand out or appeal to mass audiences....

Oatier by AllGood

Demand for dairy alternatives continues to surge. In the United States, plant-based milks and proteins are reportedly popular among a third of adults thanks to their perceived health benefits, as well as consumers’ increasing environmental awareness and plant-based lifestyles. Soy, of course, was the OG substitute, until almond milk came to dominate the market. But now, it’s all about oats....