Technology
Koto’s new branding for restaurant discovery app Franki feels lively, thoroughly human, and just the right amount of cute
Franki is an app for restaurants: people that like to visit them, and people who run them. Billed as a “social restaurant discovery and rewards platform”, Franki was founded by Austin, Texas-based Eugene Varricchio and Nick Bennett in 2020 (obviously not the best year for dining out, by any stretch), before expanding more broadly the following year. The platform itself...
Ragged Edge creates refreshingly wholesome identity for AI notepad Granola
Granola is a brand that’s certainly made itself known in recent months – at least to those using various lines on the London Underground. Indeed, there was a time when you could barely move for its ads; its assertions that Granola was ‘not for breakfast’. Those ads certainly caught my eye, then – especially in a sea of similar things...
Mother Design gives psychic platform Keen a 90s New Age sensibility for the digital age – and it works beautifully
Arguably, we’re approaching a time that could be seen to be ‘post-woo-woo’ – as in, those things that have long been dismissed as daft; the preserve of silly women and charlatans and people whose lives revolve around cats and an unmistakable whiff of Nag Champa – are becoming increasingly acceptable. With the concept of ‘wellness’ now well and truly established...
20(Something) borrows from museum-modernity as much as tech in its new identity for civic software platform Open Point
I’ve no idea what this trend is called, or indeed if it even has a name, but I’m seeing it around a hell of a lot lately: t-shirts (usually very crisp, almost box-fresh-clean, and white) with a tonne of text emblazoned across the back. It doesn’t seem to matter at all what the text says, to means, but there’s a...
Koto gives programmer forum Stack Overflow a reason to exist in the age of AI
Since starting life in 2008, Stack Overflow has functioned as a website/platform/forum that soon became a sort of internet go-to as a shared notebook or tool guide for programmers: somewhere they can ask questions, answer them, and have them answered by other actual real life people who’ve probably been there and done that, and want to impart the wisdom they’ve...
If you’ve visited an off-licence, you’ve heard of Lebara – now thanks to Verve, the brand finally makes sense
Lebara. Le-ba-ra. It’s a word that’s become so familiar to many of us, sonically at least, as to have become almost part of the wallpaper. But semantically, conceptually, literally – do many of us really know what it is? If you’re anything like me or the very small sample of around five to six people who just happened to be...
Studio Gruhl’s Global Hypercolour-esque brand identity for Rerun looks to “see what robots see”
Rerun is described as “a unified data layer for physical data that helps teams build smarter robots” which consists of two parts: Rerun SDK, “an open source library and tools for logging, storing, querying, visualising, and training on multi-rate, multimodal data”; and Rerun Hub, a “data catalogue and backend for large scale storage, access, and streaming of robotics data from...
NoomaLooma by Cotton
NoomaLooma is described as a “platform built around small moments of making”. As far as I can tell, it’s an app in its early stages (at the moment, it’s just for iPhone), and it’s launched with a brand identity created by New York studio Cotton (the design team behind the excellent identity for Eternal Research). The platform was created by...
Dataforeningen by Bielke & Yang
Dataforeningen simply translates as ‘data organisation’ from Norwegian to English, and funnily enough, that’s exactly what the organisation is. Operating nationwide across Norway serving people working in tech, it was looking for a new identity that reflected a shift in who and what it was, and its future aims. Taking on this potentially tricky brief was Oslo-based Bielke & Yang...
Cute, curious and cuddly
Fitness and health tracking apps are not generally known for their sense of fun. The likes of MyFitnessPal, while great in terms of functionality, for the most part, keep the design stuff resolutely serious, no-nonsense, and perfunctory. Meanwhile the likes of Strava elicit joy through very few things, the main one being when people decide to run in a shape...
Free your mouth
You don’t really hear the word ‘quip’ all that often – it feels somewhat antiquanted in a way, a little eccentric, somehow very English. The sort of thing gracing the cover of the sort of book someone bought as a gift for someone they don’t really know very well, nor particularly care about – maybe 101 of Oscar Wilde’s Wittiest...
Gaming Goes Goblin-mode
Remember the heady days of 2022, as we emerged blinking into the light in a cautious post-pandemic haze – confused, slightly heavier, wondering whether we should cancel Disney+ now that going out was sort-of-possible? It was then that The Oxford Languages Word of the Year (well, two words if we’re being pedantic, which is surely an approach the famous dictionary-pedlars...