The once laudable claim to have started a thriving business with ‘a small loan’ from a doting family member may have been muddied beyond recognition by the truth-stretching of serial tax-offender and part-time Presidential candidate Donald Trump. Despite this, turning ‘one thousand pounds from nan’ into a luxury watch and diamond dealership with a sparkling flagship store in Mayfair remains...
It’s all well and good for a design agency to make some wild, boundary-pushing, all-singing all-dancing work for things like Gen Z healthcare products; or ‘top shelf’ spirits; or craft beer. But most client projects aren’t going to be the sort of thing that merits bright orange and typography that dances around the boundaries of legibility. And arguably, it’s those...
According to The Collected Works, one of the main reasons its recent client Expensify was looking to rebrand was to remedy a perceived mismatch between the ‘wacky’ vibe of the brand’s marketing and ads (namely its 2019 Superbowl commercial), and its core visual identity. Which begs the question – how far does a brand identity itself have to mimic or...
Recchiuti Confections is a San Francisco-based gourmet chocolatier that creates chocolates with unique flavour combinations. Using traditional European techniques, with locally sourced ingredients from Northern Californian farms and markets, Recchiuti’s chocolates have earned a loyal customer base and several accolades. After 25 years in business, Recchiuti sought the expertise of Manual – a local design studio – for a brand...
The Beams is ‘an expansive new venue and event space on the Royal Docks in the heart of East London’ (that’s as long as you prefer your cartography loosely impressionist). Manchester-based Only Studio was tasked with branding the former Tate & Lyle sugar factory. The award-winning agency has previous form in the field of London industrial-eyesores-turned-cultural-juggernauts: it was also responsible...
It is fair to say that rebrands of music organisations, of which there have been a number in the past few years, have benefitted from the recent explosion of graphic design into the world of sound and motion. Music has always inspired other forms of art, but these new digital tools are uniquely suited for producing design solutions for these...
Guts aren’t exactly glamorous. And the connotations of the word ‘gut’ are multifarious: there’s the gory (‘blood and guts’); the Germanic ‘good’; the straightforwardly corporeal; or for those with an interest in newer psychological findings, it’s a wondrous ‘second brain’. Ad agency folk, however, have long taken the word ‘guts’ far outside of the bodily. For many of them, ‘guts’...
In the words of synesthete Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music’. Unlike 19th-century architecture, contemporary graphic design is afforded no such static reprieve – it faces the challenge of animating the ‘universal language’. Whereas once the plastic arts could content themselves with merely freezing music, any contemporary attempt to visually translate music must now...
A marshmallow is sweet, soft, pliable. Yet they are also resilient and surprisingly strong – who among us hasn’t enjoyed watching them perform surprisingly well under a hydraulic press compared to substances that much more obviously scream ‘structural integrity’? Perhaps this soft-yet-strong dynamic is why the name works for an insurance company. Or perhaps, more simply, the name works because...
Beyond its eye-wateringly strong beers, decadent chocolates, and waffles; Belgium is famous for serving up one beloved belt-buster that’s easy to eat, and deceptively hard to get right: chips. A new Belgian homemade burger and snacks offer, Frydate, positions itself far beyond a humble chippie and into the realm of ‘Belgian frymanship’-led ‘friterie concept’. To help it achieve its ‘insatiable...
As the adage goes, ‘Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime’. With this vivid paradigm of self-sufficiency in mind, we can esteem the advent of creative coding in branding, allowing design agencies to hand brands over to clients as generative tools capable of generating limitless...
If you grew up in the UK, the Natural History Museum is likely synonymous with two things: the massive blue whale suspended from the ceiling, or the equally large diplodocus skeleton. For many British kids, the museum is a childhood staple – either from school trips, or days out with parents who, rather savvily, combine a widespread fascination among youngsters...