Few things have a design legacy quite like the Olympics: it’s hard to think of another event or organisation that has both a history spanning more than 120 years (the first modern Olympics’ was in 1896), and a distinct graphic identity each time it takes place. Since every Games has its own unique ‘emblem’ logomark device, the events become sort...
For non-design nuts or print nerds, paper might seem pretty high up in the scale of banality and boringness. That’s likely the reason that the Wernham Hogg paper company was the setting of The Office: paper, and Slough, formed an easy sitcom shorthand for all that was unremarkable, trivial, and emphatically dry. But in fact, there’s a lot more to...
The concepts of ‘money transfer’ and ‘community’ don’t immediately seem to go hand in hand: the former feels cold, slightly dry, potentially confusing and rather literally transactional; the latter is all cuddly and feelings and people-y. But uniting these two seemingly disparate worlds is exactly what DesignStudio did recently in its rebranding of Sendwave, a digital platform offering money transfers...
LES Tigre – not to be confused with seminal electroclash/riot grrrl combo Le Tigre – is a cocktail lounge in Manhattan’s Lower East Side area, which opened at the end of last year and apparently combines ‘sophistication and refinement in drink, sound and ambiance’ with an entrance that boasts ‘an original graffiti-worn door’. So far, so hip, amirite? It all...
As well as being a coastal city in south west Italy (formed in 1923 by none other than Benito Mussolini), Imperia is a pasta machine company that was formed from a ‘little artisan workshop’ in 1932. Imperia soon began to distribute pasta machines around the world; mainly catering to the US’ large Italian community. From its plant in Sant’Ambrogio, Turin,...
We’ve covered no shortage of work by Pentagram in the past, most recently Cohere but spanning projects for London Fashion Week, NYC Parks, National History Museum and more. This is the first time, however, that we’ve looked at a project by new-ish New York office partner Andrea Trabucco-Campos and his team – and it’s safe to say, we’re impressed. Graphic...
Branding a film production company is a delicate business. On the one hand, you need branding that can match and even enhance the quality of the films being produced, but on the other, you need something that doesn’t distract from the work or compete with it. Film is an intrinsically creative visual medium, and building a framework to support it...
There have been some brilliant logo designs inspired by the very buildings they represent. The Centre Pompidou, for instance, bears a powerfully stark logo that’s been largely unchanged since it was first created in the 1970s: six black stripes crossed by two zigzags representing the site’s ‘caterpillar’ escalator, one of the most famous parts of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’...
As recognisable brands go, LEGO is up there with the Nike swooshes and McGolden Arches of this world. Pretty much anything in that red and yellow lockup with vaguely Stay Puft-esque lettering (naturally there’s a LEGO version of that exact sailor) instantly says ‘LEGO’ – even when what it really says is, unlawfully, ‘Lepin’; or somehow scraping into legality, ‘Xinh’;...
When it comes to pre-packaged, semi-liquid meals and snacks, it’s easy to cite the infamous examples that are now stand-ins for whole demographics – I’m talking about SlimFast, the epitome of 90s diet culture; biohacker fuel Soylent; and, more recently, the US-based celeb-backed Daily Harvest, which made headlines due to product recall over food poisoning incidents. But there’s perhaps no...
It’s often the launch of major charity rebrands that puts the gulf between how the design world views something, and how the rest of the world might, into sharp relief. Countless headlines abound bemoaning the £££millions ‘spent on a new logo’, as if that’s just about all there is to it, and now the children/animals/elderly etc will directly suffer as...
Not a new project, but one certainly worth revisiting; this work for whisky brand The Gospel scooped a fair few awards back in 2020, and it’s not hard to see why. The design agency behind everything from strategy and naming to brand story, creative direction, packaging design, and more is DDMMYY, based in Auckland, New Zealand. The team was initially...