Ideas around the ‘new codes of luxury’ have come up a lot lately; an updated, contemporary take on what makes something look special, valuable, covetable, and ultimately, expensive. The long and short of it is that it’s out with the old – lavish foils, gold everywhere, bling and ornamentation and ostentation – and in with a quieter, more subtle aesthetic...
I could be totally wrong, but it really does look like New York-based branding agency The Working Assembly had a lot of fun working on the branding for Pinky Swear. A restaurant and cocktail lounge on Chrystie St on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Pinky Swear opened earlier this year as a fascinating concept unlike anything we’ve really encountered before: yes,...
ITO Gin is first and foremost, brilliantly eyecatching – huge fluorescent letters, the epitome of ‘make it big’ when it comes to a brand name; deep black bottles – behind this bold exterior lies a narrative woven across cultures, histories, and generations. The brand was born of a collaboration between Komaki Distillery in Japan and UK-based gin brand Kokoro. However,...
Muse Group exists as a collection of digital products covering all aspects of the creative process in music. This reviewer is familiar with Audacity and has used it in the past, but other platforms include Ultimate Guitar, MuseClass, MuseScore, and MuseHub. These tools are used by a range of professional musicians, budding amateurs, and everyone in between, working across all...
Back in 2013, Michael Bierut’s team at Pentagram (Twelve Labs, Becan & Natural History Museum) created the identity for Yale University’s inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes, a major literary award that honours outstanding achievement in the fields of fiction, non-fiction and drama. Bestowed by the estate of the writer Donald Windham and his companion Sandy M. Campbell, the awards are administered...
If New York really is the city that never sleeps, that’s in no small part thanks to coffee – and now, increasingly, a newer entrant to the socially acceptable uppers scene, matcha. Capitalising on the growing interest in the sludgy green pick-me-up is 12, a new-ish matcha-centric café and retail store that opened last year in Manhattan’s NoHo area. Sited...
Big Cartel launched in 2005 as a low-cost, easily customisable ecommerce platform specifically aimed at artists and other creatives. In the two decades since, the platform has quietly revolutionised what it is to be an independent maker, powering more than $2.5 billion in sales from ceramicists, jewellery designers, illustrators, and the occasional medieval tapestry revivalist. But as the marketplace for,...
Klangwelt Toggenburg (which translates as ‘sound world Toggenburg’) is a cultural organisation that manages to marry a devotion to the experience and exploration of (you guessed it) sound, with breathtakingly gorgeous (as far as I can tell from Google Images, anyway) mountainous natural landscapes of the Swiss Alps, and some serious architectural chops to boot. Klangwelt Toggenburg began life more...
Combining an online shop, journal, and collective, BRiMM describes itself as a platform for ‘planet-positive living’, drawing together some big ideas and ruthlessly sustainable brands. Based between London and Stockholm, it was founded last year by James Haycock, who’s billed as, ‘an exited founder, angel investor, and the vision behind’ it all. The fact the whole thing looks so great...
Naming your company ‘Church’ is, it’s probably fair to say, a bit of an edgy move. Some might even go as far as to suggest it to be sacrilegious. But here, in the case of this proverbial temple of film post production, Church seems to really fit – and without even the faintest hint of edgelordery about it all. And...
Arguably London’s street food scene has become less a ‘scene’, more a network of long queues sprawling their way across the capital faster than you can say ‘SEVEN pounds! For some strawberries!’ From Borough to Barbican’s Whitecross Street, Spitalfields to Southbank, Camden to Covent Garden; the menus are global, the prices hefty, the hype palpable, and the branding overwhelmingly forgettable....
Estonia’s Siuru plays with important questions, subverting and, at the same time, fulfilling expectations. Is it an art museum? A library? A cinema? Or a cultural institution? For a Bond (Veikkausliiga, Saaristo, Cable Factory) the design studio in charge of developing a brand identity for Siuru, this raised the concern, how do you brand something that seeks not to be characterised...