It seems you can’t move for well-designed, wellness-adjacent alcohol-free drinks brands right now. In the past couple of months alone we’ve covered a nightlife inspired Yerba Maté that went hard on Big Drink NRG and Rolus, a new botanically enhanced entry into the (apparently) burgeoning ‘braincare beverage’ category. Making it a hat-trick is London-brewed water kefir brand Agua de Madre’s...
Since 2020, engineers-turned-mushroom entrepreneurs Vathana Len and Daniel Vogt have been growing the fanciest mushrooms I’ve ever seen, from their shiny urban greenhouse in Montreal. From Pholiote adipeuse to King eryngii (I don’t know what those are either) and everything in between, Full Pin’s mushrooms are cultivated with meticulous precision and at an impressive rate – over 700 pounds per...
Back in the early 00s – the era when arguably Hollyoaks was at its zenith, and bellybutton piercings their most bejeweled – Botox was gradually emerging from the hushed clinics of Harley Street and LA to become part of common parlance. As such, brands cottoned on to the word’s ‘eternal youth’ connotations: I distinctly remember a shampoo ad promising that...
Remember when the conversation around gradients was about making ‘bad’ design look ‘better’? When RGB colours were frowned upon because you couldn’t print them? Yeah, those ideas feel a bit outdated now. HP Indigo can now run fluorescents affordably, and business card mock-ups (in RGB) are more about selling than printing. Technology marches on, expectations and standards evolve, and everything...
Fuku (no sniggering at the back please) is a ‘fine brining establishment’ – i.e. some sort of eatery, you can safely assume – specialising in a specific type of chicken ‘sando’, or in normal language, ‘sandwich’. According to Red Antler, the Brooklyn based design agency behind Fuku’s branding, ‘the Fuku sando first hit the scene as a secret menu item...
Okay, let’s get it out of the way… yes, there are elements of Pentagram’s 2018 Library of Congress in Leo Burnett’s work for the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). In both projects, type is a frame for images of archive material. Is it BP&O’s responsibility to acknowledge similarities in all the work we publish, tracking a typology back to the start...
‘Saaristo’ is the generic term for ‘archipelago’ in Finnish, but – to the outside world – it’s sufficiently distinctive to refer to the entire region in Western Finland, which now makes up a new tourism brand. This brand intends to generate more interest in (and visitors to) the world’s largest archipelago: a collection of 40,000 islands. This scale makes it...
Berlin-based techno label Spellbound was founded last year by Shaleen, a DJ, producer, and the woman behind the SURD series of femme- and queer-centric events. Known for her 90’s-infused vinyl-only sets and her ethos of looking back at techno’s roots in order to move it forward, it makes sense that her own label is something of an ode to Berlin’s...
There isn’t a shortage of well-executed, interesting branding projects out there – ones that are joyful, witty, slick, or just perfectly fit a brief – which do their job perfectly. But 99% of the time, you can sort of see where they came from – the broader cultural spheres they’re playing into (nostalgia; fauxstalgia; irony, for instance) or the wider...
Independent content studio North Road was founded in 2022 to unite a portfolio of companies covering everything from scripted entertainment (‘Chernin Entertainment’) and non-scripted content (‘Kinetic Content’) to non-fiction productions (under ‘Words + Pictures’). Across these entities, North Road is one of the largest global suppliers of TV and film content, and is able to work on over 70 active...
I’d lazily assumed that, like jazz record sleeves and Dutch public transport, zoos were one of those sectors with a visual legacy that’s packed with game-changing brand design – the sort that fills the pages of graphic design histories, up there with the likes of Paul Rand’s ‘IBM’ and the FedEx arrow and Alan Fletcher’s gloriously clever ampersand trickery for...
The name Ultraderp seeks to combine all things extreme (think ‘ultrafast’, or ‘ultra marathon’) with ‘derp’, which is, apparently, the face a dog makes when they don’t know what’s happening. The product that bears this name is an ultra-light, easily-packable dog leash that can be worn on the collar and deployed when needed, simply by pulling the tongue-like tab. This...