Creative Packaging
Makebardo’s charming illustrations for Cairo cafe/music venue E11VN just about rescue a rather hideous brand name
It’s never fun being negative about a project – it’s far more gratifying to show really great work, genuinely exciting or useful brands and organisations – and get under the skin of what makes them so. Obviously, a fair bit of this comes down to subjective taste; taking our own experiences and interpretations and cultural backgrounds and personalities and all...
Industrial, conceptual, and starkly beautiful: DutchScot’s branding for SF sauna and cold plunge, Fjord
Fjord is a new floating sauna and cold-water plunge experience moored in San Francisco Bay’s Sausalito area. Rather than being exclusively positioned as a wellness-type experience, instead it looks to float, as it were, somewhere between architecture, hospitality and outdoor recreation. It’s a very modern take on the centuries-old tradition of saunas and how they’re used – the shift between...
Pentagram’s designs for male health brand Rugiet are unabashedly phallic, but they work
One of the more hilariously on the, er, nose identities I’ve seen in recent times here in the form of Pentagram New York’s work for Rugiet, a men’s health brand offering personalised, clinically-backed treatments sold exclusively online. Formerly better known as Rugiet Health, Rugiet was founded in Austin, Texas, in 2020 as a telehealth company. Back then, the company was...
Studio Blackburn’s branding for Ellis Butchers is unflinchingly carcass-centric, yet somehow so full of warmth
As a vegan of two decades, and a squeamish one at that, the thought alone of a “whole-carcass butcher business” makes me feel rather queasy – so it’s a testament to Studio Blackburn’s incredible skill that despite my personal nonsense, I absolutely adore this branding project. And I love it not in spite of things like the utterly unflinching, raw-flesh-laden...
Exemplary brand collabs don’t compromise: the joyful designs for Midnight Hotdog ‘dog fur mist’ by SMLXL
Back in February, we covered a project that was so delightful I still think of it often (not least thanks to its utterly ridiculous, ingenuously earwormish jingle): HotDog, with its branding by SMLXL. There was, and is, so much to love about this identity: there’s the logo formed of two dogs, one sniffing the other’s bum, reduced to its most...
Base’s brand for smalltown ’80s seafood spot Ray’s is a masterclass in earnestness done well
It’s always a joy to see an international design agency lavish the same respect, care, and craft on a relatively unknown, thoroughly local, but much-beloved brand as they would on, say, a household name product or world-renowned institution. And that’s exactly what Base Design (Kanal, 4P’s, The Huntington) – which has outposts in New York, Brussels, Melbourne, Geneva, and Saigon...
Another Collective’s identity for smash burger brand Brusco deftly reinvents classic burger joint design tropes
Food trends are a funny old thing aren’t they. And just as design trends are never just about ‘aesthetics’ – the ‘what something looks like’ divorced from the world around it, food trends aren’t just about ‘edible stuff’, or ‘what things taste like’. Such movements both hold up a mirror to, predict, and feed back to us (literally, in the...
Mecca Coffee by Christopher Doyle & Co.
Sydney-based Mecca Coffee started life in 2005, and has since become one of the city’s leading specialty coffee roasters, importers, and retailers. To mark the company’s 20th anniversary, Christopher Doyle & Co. (Ortto, Machine Screen Printers, New Aim), which is also based in Sydney, was brought in to evolve its brand identity across “packaging, merchandising and collateral systems,” Doyle explains....
Strangers by Auge Design
Strangers is a new confectionery brand created by Valgosa, a family company dating back to 1912 and seemingly best known as purveyors of saffron. It seems an unlikely starting point for such a boldly positioned brand – and one boasting an exquisite visual identity thanks to Milan-based Auge Design (Erbert, Ginori 1735). According to Auge – which worked across everything...
Six Six by A Friend of Mine
Six Six is an eyewear store and optometrist based in Melbourne, which opened early this year with the aim to be “more like a destination than a store”. Tasked with creating the brand identity to make that happen was A Friend of Mine, or AFOL for short (Embla, Great Wrap, Suupaa), a brand design studio also based in Melbourne which...
Gaptooth Soda by Saint Urbain
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...
Like, so retro, but so the future
There’s really so little not to love about this branding for Sooki – in fact, I’d go as far as saying there’s nothing not to love. It’s purely, and simply, gorgeous; every goddam inch of it. Kudos, then, to The Collected Works, the New York City- and New Orleans-based independent design studio behind the identity design created to bring Sooki...