One person’s imperfection is another’s luck– especially, it turns out, when it comes to teeth. The front-tooth-gap, as exemplified and celebrated by the likes of Madonna (and, it turns out, Chaucer’s famously, unabashedly lustful “gap-toothed” Wife of Bath) is known in more scientific or medical terms as a ‘diastema’.

Many see this aesthetic dental quirk as attractive; others not so much – especially, it seems, in North America (the continent), where dazzling poker straight gnashers are the norm, and deviations (such as most people in England’s mouths) are viewed as slightly, if not wholly, aberrant.This whole idea of gap-teeth as aberration is the starting point – nae, raison d’être, for Gaptooth Soda, a Toronto-based botanical soda brand “built around a simple but distinctive idea: celebrating imperfection”, as the agency behind its visual identity, Saint Urbain, puts it.

Saint-Urbain (Digs, Cerca, Yoshi, Cob), which has offices in New York, Montreal, Los Angeles and Mexico City, worked across the brand’s strategy, including its naming; brand identity; packaging designs; animation; photography and copywriting – all of which is based around and inspired by Gaptooth’s founder’s “gap-toothed smile”, it says.

“The brand reframes something often hidden as something worth highlighting” Saint Ubrain continues. “Nearly a quarter of the global population shares this trait, yet it’s rarely embraced. In a category dominated by polished minimalism and sameness, Gaptooth Soda offers a more human alternative — one rooted in individuality, character, and self-expression.”

It’s a refreshing idea in a sea of brands that promise the world, or at least promise a solution to its problems, however small said problems might well be in the grand scheme of things, such as finding a nice, pretty-to-look-at fizzy drink in a can.

Gaptooth Soda explains its origin story thus: “Owen [the brand’s founder] evicted his baby teeth and accidentally became a brand icon. At first, he treated his gap like a secret: zipped lips, shy smiles, and alternate-universe daydreams about perfectly straight teeth and a life of orthodontic symmetry.

“But then he realized something radical – perfect teeth don’t taste better. Perfect smiles don’t have better stories, and perfection is wildly overrated. Gaptooth is a love letter to weird smiles, weird flavours, and becoming okay with being a little off-center.”

The challenge for Saint Urbain, then, was to translate this not-quite-sobworthy story, but a personal story nonetheless, into a real-life scalable brand system that could do all that pretty much every brand has to do – stand out on shelves, offer the flexibility and capacity for future expansion into new flavours, formats and touchpoints – while doubling down on that whole idea of “embracing imperfection as both concept and design principle,” as Saint Urbain puts it.

As you might expect, visually this means eschewing neatness and straight lines for all that delights in overlaps, wobbles, colouring over the lines.

The wordmark itself, for instance, takes that post-David Shrigey approach that’s all about fuzzy thick black lines and hand drawn all-caps (though neater of course than Shrigley, what with this being the world of commercial design over fine art). It looks pretty charming all in all – just the right side of twee, just the palatable side of not-that-funny ‘comical’ illustrated birthday cards you’d buy from Scribbler.

The black and white of the wordmark works really nicely alongside the bright, summery colours used in the illustrations indicating flavour across the can designs.

While only the Yuzu flavour is currently available to buy online (not just, as I’d assumed, a posh word for lemon, but “a highly aromatic East Asian citrus fruit”, it turns out) according to Saint Urbain’s imagery the other flavours in the range currently include Cherry and Peach Soda.

Each and every one of these is brought to life so beautifully with the simple, but delightfully unkempt-leaning imagery. It looks a bit like A-Level art screen printing – far from perfect in terms of shape, line, form and accuracy, but all the more lovely for just that.

Nothing polished here; no sense of the grid, or of formality – yet of course, since this is some of the most skilled proverbial pairs of hands around right now when it comes to brand design – this is undoubtedly a carefully crafted, consistent and quiet-when-the-time is right identity overall, and one which has one eye shrewdly set on expansion and flexibility.

Indeed, the whole look, feel and tone of voice is all about, as Saint Urbain puts it, “asymmetry” and “offbeat composition,” accompanied, ameliorated and accentuated by “graphic “gaps” that are subtly interwoven throughout the identity as a recurring motif, “reinforcing the brand’s origin while creating a distinctive visual rhythm”.

Aside from the wordmark, the typography is largely set in the regular and bold weights of Agipo by Radim Peško’s London-based RP Digital Type Foundry. On the Gaptooth Soda website however, copy also uses Anybody, designed by Ithaca, New York-based designer Tyler Finck for more headline-based applications; and for body copy, Epilogue by the same designer is used – both nicely legible but distinctly quirky fonts that work really well for a brand like this.

One of my favourite aspects of this design is the adorably janky little smile icon – obviously, with very messy gaps and wildly orthodontistry-nightmarish teeth. This is by far the standout when it comes to the illustration: while the set of wee faces is cute, some of them feel a little too close to the territory of daft, where the isolated mouth is perfect in its strangeness.

However, these faces form a weird little assembly cast that undoubtedly reinforces bags of character across the whole brand world. And they’re brilliantly adaptable, proving to be flawlessly applied across everything from merch (a nice range here – and refreshing lack of tote bags – including record player slipmats, socks, can coolers etc. as well as the more usual t-shirts and packing tape).

The whole thing is a really nice riposte to all that’s overly slick, refined and tasteful – often shorthand for slightly stiff and dull – instead delighting in the weird and wonderful humanity of it all. It really does stand out, but without having to yell ‘I’M KOOKY’ in the way so many absolutely not-very-kooky things so often do.