Branding
Butter Baby by Universal Favourite
It takes a skilled pair of hands/creative agency to make you fall in love with a fictional character (lore-laden backstory and all) who is literally a big blob of fat. But as has become increasingly apparent over the years, Universal Favourite (The Dinner Ladies, Monkey Baa Theatre Co., LBDO) is more than a skilled pair of hands – I honestly...
Mutt by Brands & People
We’re at an interesting juncture when it comes to the petcare category – especially when it comes to dogs. Long gone are the days of barbour jackets and wellies, whistles, and gargantuan cans of Winalot; but we’ve also (thankfully) started to leave behind the whole ‘fur baby’ thing – the nauseating ‘cockapoo mommy’ era that ushered in things like nail...
Olive + Gourmando by Caserne
Olive + Gourmando is a Montréal bakery, café, and restaurant that opened its doors in 1998 and has since become something of a culinary institution. With its expansion to a second location, Caserne – a design studio also based in Montréal – was brought in to refresh its identity. The aim of the project, according to Caserne, was to “support...
Cob by Saint Urbain
If there’s something we’ve come to rely on Saint Urbain totally nailing, it’s a wordmark. Even the most cursory glance across their recent projects affirms the agency’s knack for a grabby, smart, playful yet sublimely appropriate approach to brand type, and this new project is no exception. The work in question is for Cob Foods, for which Saint Urbain (Buena...
Current State by Werner Design Werks
Current State is a skincare line launched by sisters Emily and Lanie Parr a couple of years back, which aims to “disrupt the status quo”, according to Werner Design Werks which created its boldly multicoloured branding. There’s a lot to love about this packaging and brand design – not least, that expansive approach to colour. It seems that Werner Design...
Post Post Hotel by Studio Bruch
If you’re reading BP&O, you’re more likely than most to be the type who knows their counters from their stems; their terminals from their tittles, and so on. In short, a TypeNerd – categorically one of the best kinds of nerd. And what do nerds like? Hyper specific ‘injokes’ that aren’t exactly striving to be funny, perhaps you might call...
Project Send by Foreign Policy
Since their advent, kinetic and variable type have become a familiar part of the lexicon of brand design. It’s little surprise really: they offer a way to make an identity consistent yet dynamic; uniform but multifarious; endlessly flexible with countless opportunities to modify mood, tone, and messaging. But few projects seem to use kinetic type as a way to visually...
Double Diamond by Alec Tear
Our seemingly indefatigable fetishisation of the ghosts of branding past (i.e. why the design world is still talking about JKR’s Burger King rebrand nearly half a decade on) is perhaps little surprise: whether we’re consciously doing so or not, and to whatever extent we’re even aware we’re looking at something archival, returning to an amorphous yesteryear — real or imagined,...
Norrin by Bond
What exactly is a ‘Norrin’? A cursory search reveals that it’s a word that means very different things to different people. For the Marvel-heads, Norrin Radd is an alias of the Silver Surfer character, described as “an honorable Zenn-Lavian who became the Herald of Galactus to spare his home planet Zenn-La and his beloved Shalla-Bal from Galactus’ hunger”. Of course!...
Philadelphia Art Museum by Gretel
Creating museum and gallery identities must be both a dream brief and an intimidating prospect for brand designers; a poisoned chalice of sorts. We hear the same challenges time and again when agencies discuss such projects: creating a brand that’s both strong and ownable but which lets the artefacts/art take centre stage; an identity that takes an institution into the...
Forest Carbon by Design Bridge Singapore
Despite the perennially frustrating widespread perception that the definition of branding is a logo (maybe a wordmark, at a push, a colour a la Cadbury’s purple or EasyJet orange ), it’s more obvious than ever as we settle into the screen-centric Digital Age that ‘brand’ is a vast and expansive thing – it’s verbal and visual and sonic, it moves...
Fhirst by Mother Design
We’ve arrived at a point where the idea of ‘y2k’ as an aesthetic has stretched beyond ‘trend’ or ‘cycle’ and morphed into an entity almost entirely devoid of the temporal placemarker its name suggests. Having been repeated ad nauseum, ‘y2k’ is no longer about a visual/cultural moment and/or collection of moments around 25 years back. Instead, it’s become a Burroughs...