Pengelly Design is a British furniture and product design studio, founded by Simon Pengelly in 1993, that embraces a material and process led approach to problem-solving, and an aesthetic that has a lightness, simplicity and timelessness. Since its foundation, the studio has gone on to secure and complete a variety of national and international furniture, transport and product design projects in collaboration with businesses and manufacturers such as Lapalma, Habitat and Modus, Virgin Atlantic and Joseph Joseph.

Simon Pengelly’s new graphic identity, created by UK based graphic design studio Spin and based around a symbol of vertical and consistently weighted strokes, draws its inspiration from the profile of one of Simon’s chairs, constructed from plywood, and set within the context of an earthy, urban and vivid colour palette of brown, grey and bright orange boards. The project included stationery, box tape, business cards and website design.

The product of a workshop visit, a simple observation, and a shared love of plywood, Spin’s logo treatment is reductive, abstract yet well-founded in its ideation and distinctive in its dynamic qualities across stationery. Although it draws on the specificity of layering plywood, this appears as a fair reflection of process in general, while its movement from slim to broad form, geometric build and balance of negative and positive space, whether intentional or not, feels like an appropriate acknowledgement of the architectonic nature of furniture.

A mix of deep earthy brown, warm concrete grey and a bright fluorescent orange, introduced as dyed and uncoated boards, finished with a black ink and emboss, and featuring a single sans-serif choice, juxtapose the traditional, natural and crafted alongside an element of utility, and punctuates these with a striking and bright contemporary flourish.

The logo’s movement from light to robust, expanded upon through board and paper weight, regular and bold typesetting, and the colour palette’s mix of the traditional and contemporary, as well as moments of craft and utility, are a solid representation of Simon Pengelly’s philosophies and a solid two-dimensional distillation of the studio’s three-dimensional work, while also securing visual impact using few assets. More from Spin on BP&O.

Design: Spin. Opinion: Richard Baird

SaveSave