The Best Custom Logotypes
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...
Olympic Museum by Studio Blackburn
Few things have a design legacy quite like the Olympics: it’s hard to think of another event or organisation that has both a history spanning more than 120 years (the first modern Olympics’ was in 1896), and a distinct graphic identity each time it takes place. Since every Games has its own unique ‘emblem’ logomark device, the events become sort...
Sendwave by DesignStudio
The concepts of ‘money transfer’ and ‘community’ don’t immediately seem to go hand in hand: the former feels cold, slightly dry, potentially confusing and rather literally transactional; the latter is all cuddly and feelings and people-y. But uniting these two seemingly disparate worlds is exactly what DesignStudio did recently in its rebranding of Sendwave, a digital platform offering money transfers...
Pomus by Sömestr Studio
Branding a film production company is a delicate business. On the one hand, you need branding that can match and even enhance the quality of the films being produced, but on the other, you need something that doesn’t distract from the work or compete with it. Film is an intrinsically creative visual medium, and building a framework to support it...