The Best Custom Logotypes
Klangwelt Toggenburg by Studio Marcus Kraft
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...
Siuru by Bond
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...
Ding by Wildish & Co.
When I left the UK and landed in the Czech Republic – my home between 2010 and 2018 – I found a notable difference in advertising and branding between the two countries. Specifically, I saw an abundance of brand mascots. Now, of course, mascots were also used in the UK and have a global historical precedent, but I was struck...
Helions by Pentagram
HELIONS… now that sounds impressive. Something to do with helium atoms and stellar fusion, the force that powers stars? Or perhaps it’s invoking Helios, the Greek god of the sun, blazing his chariot across the sky? Nope – it’s actually a tribute to Helions Bumpstead in Essex, a beneficiary of the British gift for naming that also gave us Pratt’s...
Fuku by Red Antler
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...
ROM by Leo Burnett
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 by Bond
‘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...
North Road by Manual
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...
Chester Zoo by How&How
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...
Hello Klean by Two Times Elliott
Beauty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, but there’s no denying that objectively, its branding and identity design has undergone some huge changes over the past decade or so. Gone are the days of faux-luxurious designs that were all about swathes of abstract silk; women coiffured to within an inch of their life; a microscopic lens on...
Compound by DesignStudio
What does ‘healthcare’ look like today, especially when we’re increasingly talking about preventative treatment? For Parsley Health and GlycanAge, which promote functional medicine, it’s serene – all blush pink, forest green and rounded corners; for Modern Age, which focuses on longevity, it’s more clinical, with high-resolution botanical imagery and classical icons; Ezra, which offers full-body MRIs as cancer prevention, goes...
Hanbury by Base Design
Hanbury is an American architecture firm, founded in 1979 and based in Virginia. According to international agency Base Design, which recently delivered a rebrand for the practice, the last decade has witnessed a ‘transformative’ period of growth and diversification with the team increasing from 40 to 160 individuals, and expanding from one to eight office spaces. For Hanbury, which started...