Illustration
Hip Pop by Robot Food
Running a design blog sharpens your eye for category conventions. Stick with it long enough, though, and you’ll start to see those conventions unravel. What once felt fixed begins to flex. This creates a challenge for writing about design: you’re constantly assessing the landscape, but that landscape is always shifting. Take minimalism, for example. Once the dominant aesthetic of the...
Buena Fé by Saint Urbain
Buena Fé is the first 100% organic tequila-based cocktail-in-a-can, and is made in Jalisco, Mexico, the ‘birthplace of tequila’, where the spirit was first distilled. The drink is made with 100% Blue Weber Blanco tequila, which means that all the alcohol in Buena Fé comes from the agave plant. Unlike your short Margarita, or shortish Paloma, these ready-to-drink cocktails are...
Bettr by Anak
Between the late 2000s and the early 2010s, the coffee industry turned its attention to ‘craft’, elevating the beverage to a gourmet offering. When it came to brand storytelling, flavour notes, provenance and sustainability became key components. These features came to define what’s now known as ‘third-wave coffee’, which pre-dates the gamified science-infused ‘fourth-wave coffee’ movement in terms of textures...
Bezi by Red Antler
Bezi was founded by Ilay Karateke – an Istanbul-raised, New York-based, ex-McKinsey consultant turned cheesemaker – and Hasan Bahcivan – a Berkeley-trained engineer from one of Turkey’s largest and most legacied cheesemaking families. Both grew up in large families, with their lives punctuated by big family-style meals shared with friends and neighbours. Labneh, a Middle Eastern spreadable cheese, was ever...
Wholy Greens by Control Studio
Wholy Greens is a B-Corp certified Dutch food brand dedicated to transforming the way people perceive and enjoy vegetables. Its mission is to create a mindset shift from ‘having to eat veggies’ to ‘genuinely loving veggies’ – and it uses pasta as its primary vehicle. It’s a smart set up, not least because, frankly, what experiences aren’t more enjoyable when...
Jaffa by Earthling
This took me probably longer than it should have to get my head around, but bear with me: Jaffa oranges – also known as Shamouti oranges in Arabic – are a specific variety of orange cultivated in Israel, Palestine, Cyprus, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey, known for their relatively few seeds and tough skin. These qualities make them especially...
The Dinner Ladies by Universal Favourite
‘Dinner ladies’ doesn’t have the most glamorous connotations in England – depending on your experience at school, it likely conjures up memories of scoops of greying, tepid mash-adjacent slop unceremoniously plopped onto a plate; something to do with turkey dinosaurs; a troop of formidable but visibly jaded people responsible for making every school smell like on-the-turn cottage pie from around...
Fluz by Koto
It can’t be easy designing the identity for a brand or company that’s hard to define, or which isn’t easily explained by that ‘new product, familiar ideas’ trope – the sorts of things described as ‘Like Tinder, but for cats!’ or ‘CityMapper for life decisions’, or ‘Uber for people who want to try dogging but can’t drive’ (if any investor...
Tessas Eplegård by Olssøn Barbieri
One of the many brilliant things about the world of branding is that to work in it, write about it, or just take an interest in it forces you to learn something about pretty much everything. Maybe that’s how LEGO might actually be a better investment than gold; or that Murray’s Parmigiano Reggiano cheese pairs well with a nice New...
Bacàn by Pentagram
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...
Murray’s Cheese by Base Design
The ‘shoppy shop’ trend shows no sign of abating. For those not in the know, the term – popularised by New York Magazine’s Grub Street – indicates those small-to-medium businesses selling upmarket ‘provisions’ (charcuterie, legumes, sauces, tinned goods) with a veneer of heritage, authenticity, and (seemingly) innovative ingredients, as if they were the modern ‘general stores’ of olden days. On...
Kikin by Koto
When you think about the world of financial investments, an image of woven Scouts’ patches isn’t typically the first thing that springs to mind. Other contemporary brands (like Monzo, Chip, and Plum) aim for visual simplicity over complex personality development or extended world-building. But while a rugged outdoor theme might feel incongruous in the fin-tech space, Koto has skilfully capitalised...