Typography
Makebardo’s charming illustrations for Cairo cafe/music venue E11VN just about rescue a rather hideous brand name
It’s never fun being negative about a project – it’s far more gratifying to show really great work, genuinely exciting or useful brands and organisations – and get under the skin of what makes them so. Obviously, a fair bit of this comes down to subjective taste; taking our own experiences and interpretations and cultural backgrounds and personalities and all...
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...
Pentagram’s designs for male health brand Rugiet are unabashedly phallic, but they work
One of the more hilariously on the, er, nose identities I’ve seen in recent times here in the form of Pentagram New York’s work for Rugiet, a men’s health brand offering personalised, clinically-backed treatments sold exclusively online. Formerly better known as Rugiet Health, Rugiet was founded in Austin, Texas, in 2020 as a telehealth company. Back then, the company was...
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...
Studio Blackburn’s branding for Ellis Butchers is unflinchingly carcass-centric, yet somehow so full of warmth
As a vegan of two decades, and a squeamish one at that, the thought alone of a “whole-carcass butcher business” makes me feel rather queasy – so it’s a testament to Studio Blackburn’s incredible skill that despite my personal nonsense, I absolutely adore this branding project. And I love it not in spite of things like the utterly unflinching, raw-flesh-laden...
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...
Base’s brand for smalltown ’80s seafood spot Ray’s is a masterclass in earnestness done well
It’s always a joy to see an international design agency lavish the same respect, care, and craft on a relatively unknown, thoroughly local, but much-beloved brand as they would on, say, a household name product or world-renowned institution. And that’s exactly what Base Design (Kanal, 4P’s, The Huntington) – which has outposts in New York, Brussels, Melbourne, Geneva, and Saigon...
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...
Creative Spark’s bold, no nonsense identity for hair loss brand Leo
Leo is billed as a “hair rejuvenation brand”, founded by duo Jason Saks (who carries the rather sweet, and quite funny job title of Director of Hair Loss) and his son Joe, with the broad aim to make hair loss feel “less isolating and less complicated”. According to Manchester-based design agency Creative Spark, which has created the superb new identity,...
Another Collective’s identity for smash burger brand Brusco deftly reinvents classic burger joint design tropes
Food trends are a funny old thing aren’t they. And just as design trends are never just about ‘aesthetics’ – the ‘what something looks like’ divorced from the world around it, food trends aren’t just about ‘edible stuff’, or ‘what things taste like’. Such movements both hold up a mirror to, predict, and feed back to us (literally, in the...
OlssønBarbieri rewrites the rulebook on ‘formality’ in its melodrama-infused Theaterbaren identity
Oslo’s Nationaltheatret (simply translated to English as National Theatre) first opened its doors more than a century ago in 1899, and has since come to not only reflect, but actively shape cultural identity in Norway. Having staged everything from more traditional Norwegian dramas from the likes of Henrik Ibsen to experimental contemporary works, the building itself is also a marriage...