Creative Packaging
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...
Where fallow deer roam
Deer feel like unlikely ambassadors/ mascots/ PosterCreatures for olive oil, but it turns out they work brilliantly – when, that is, in the superlatively capable hands of a studio like SMLXL. Said olive oil is D’arbequina, a name which more broadly simply refers to the sort of plant from which the oil is produced: Arbequina is a widely cultivated olive...
Goofy, playful and knowingly a bit silly
Design systems are often spoken about in terms of those moments of ‘surprise and delight’, but often, there’s little either surprising or delightful to be found. Blurr Bureau’s new brand identity for Yes! Apples, however, is so brimming with surprise and delight that those moments become the entire timeframe here: the Easter Eggs absolutely abound here, for the brand design...
Equipped for Life
The protein market has absolutely boomed in recent years – a trend that doesn’t look as though it’s going away any time soon: a 2025 survey from the US-based International Food Information Council (IFIC) revealed that the most common diet that Americans followed in the past year was “high protein”, and that consumers use “good source of protein” as the...
HotDog by SMLXL
From the moment I turned the sound up (as per instructions) on the ‘about’ page of the HotDog website, safe to say I was obsessed with this brand and its branding. It’s laugh out loud hilarious – I truly loled, as did the person I was sharing a room with, and as I’m sure anyone within eye- or ear-shot would...
Storrd by Among Equals
London is awash with convenience stores – from the acrid yellow signage of Nisa to the misleadingly named ubiquity of Costcutter to the countless independents named things like Ben’s, despite the fact they have nothing to do with anybody called Ben. Such shops – reliably there at most times of day, reliably overpriced (hence the convenience I suppose, like an...
Eat Dirt by Cachete Jack and Marta Veludo Studio
The best branding and packaging projects – or at least the ones that most excite this slightly jaded old design hack – are those that not only take a category and do something genuinely innovative within it, but the ones that rethink structure as much as style. The identity for Eat Dirt does all that and more, and so safe...
Bugg by Seachange
Bugg is a New Zealand-based gardening brand founded earlier this year as the sibling of garden tools and accessories retailer Gubba. It bills itself as “premium products for people who live in the garden,” but its charming brand design definitely goes harder on the latter half of that clause than the former. Not that it looks cheap by any means...