Creative Packaging
Vans didn’t need reinventing – Accept & Proceed’s new brand identity understands that
I love my Vans almost literally to death: the little black, three-hole plimsolls are so well-loved that there are holes in both big toes, and on the right side, actual horizontal tears across the top. They’re sun-bleached to the point of almost unrecognition, holey as hell, ripped up and yet still, so unbelievably comfortable that I can’t bear to part...
All Purpose ditches wine clichés in its lurid new identity for natural wine importer Ancestrel
Based in leafy yummy-mummyish south London enclave Forest Hill, Ancestrel (yes that’s a deliberate misspelling) is a wine shop and so much more – it’s proudly the first company in the UK to import natural wine. Having started life in 2016, Ancestrel has spent the decade since making a name for itself as a renowned importer, wholesaler, and retailer of...
Pentagram nails controlled chaos in its identity for Manhattan “shophouse” style Thai restaurant LenLen
It’s not easy to make an identity look genuinely effortless – more often than not, the very intention to do so renders the result looking the exact opposite. And nothing, no one, ever wants to be levelled with the accusation of appearing to be ‘trying too hard’. However, Pentagram New York’s partner Andrea Trabucco-Campos and team has succeeded in that...
Coca-Cola’s new identity by JKR proves that sometimes the smartest rebrand is barely a rebrand at all
It’s hard to think of a bigger name client than Coca-Cola: the brand is so huge that it’s become a shorthand for anything meaning ‘global mega-corp’. Its reach is so vast, its history so firmly cemented in culture that it practically owns a certain combination of red and white; a specific sort of alliterative script serif type. Even its bottle...
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....