The Best Custom Logotypes
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...
Studio Blackburn’s new identity for folding bike icon Brompton cements the brand’s place in British engineering heritage
Pretty much the one and only memorable brand name when it comes to bikes you can fold up and carry around, Brompton – as its thoroughly British name might suggest – was founded in England in 1975 by engineer Andrew Ritchie, who developed the first prototype in his West London flat. The original Brompton bike design specifically looked to tackle...
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...
Industrial, conceptual, and starkly beautiful: DutchScot’s branding for SF sauna and cold plunge, Fjord
Fjord is a new floating sauna and cold-water plunge experience moored in San Francisco Bay’s Sausalito area. Rather than being exclusively positioned as a wellness-type experience, instead it looks to float, as it were, somewhere between architecture, hospitality and outdoor recreation. It’s a very modern take on the centuries-old tradition of saunas and how they’re used – the shift between...
JKR overhauls football club Sporting CP by doing what it does best : plundering heritage to build a robustly simple, contemporary brand identity
JKR is perhaps – in recent-ish years at least – best known for its work with Burger King, undoubtedly one of the most oft-cited rebrands of the last decade in design circles. Then it did KFC; before that, the RSPCA, alongside a raft of other household name entities which aren’t acronyms – Uber, Boddingtons, Yahoo, Billington’s sugar. In short, hugely...
Exemplary brand collabs don’t compromise: the joyful designs for Midnight Hotdog ‘dog fur mist’ by SMLXL
Back in February, we covered a project that was so delightful I still think of it often (not least thanks to its utterly ridiculous, ingenuously earwormish jingle): HotDog, with its branding by SMLXL. There was, and is, so much to love about this identity: there’s the logo formed of two dogs, one sniffing the other’s bum, reduced to its most...
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...