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...
There’s really so little not to love about this branding for Sooki – in fact, I’d go as far as saying there’s nothing not to love. It’s purely, and simply, gorgeous; every goddam inch of it. Kudos, then, to The Collected Works, the New York City- and New Orleans-based independent design studio behind the identity design created to bring Sooki...
Deer feel like unlikely ambassadors/ mascots/ PosterCreatures for olive oil, but it turns out they work brilliantly – when, that is, in the superlatively capable hands of a studio like SMLXL. Said olive oil is D’arbequina, a name which more broadly simply refers to the sort of plant from which the oil is produced: Arbequina is a widely cultivated olive...
Design systems are often spoken about in terms of those moments of ‘surprise and delight’, but often, there’s little either surprising or delightful to be found. Blurr Bureau’s new brand identity for Yes! Apples, however, is so brimming with surprise and delight that those moments become the entire timeframe here: the Easter Eggs absolutely abound here, for the brand design...
It’s always confusing, surprising and slightly disappointing when you come across art or design-focused brands, agencies, platforms, publications or organisations that seem to have a total disregard for what they look like – as though their own central premise and raison d’etre is at odds with their look and feel. I won’t name names, because that feels both mean and...
The protein market has absolutely boomed in recent years – a trend that doesn’t look as though it’s going away any time soon: a 2025 survey from the US-based International Food Information Council (IFIC) revealed that the most common diet that Americans followed in the past year was “high protein”, and that consumers use “good source of protein” as the...
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...
Ten or so years ago I’d wager that most of us hadn’t even heard of padel, but the tennis-adjacent pursuit has boomed in recent years: there’s reportedly a whopping 30 million padel players worldwide, as of stats from late 2024. Despite the fact the name sounds somewhat Ye Olde-ish – it wouldn’t be surprising to see a reference or two...
It wasn’t too long ago that we were deluged by think pieces bemoaning the state of dating apps; detailing their fall-from-favour in data that showed in cold hard numbers that their popularity had long since boomed. The swipe-laden online dating world, it seems, was drastically waning. All sorts of theories flew around: maybe Gen Z – frequently (bafflingly, implausibly) lauded...
From the moment I turned the sound up (as per instructions) on the ‘about’ page of the HotDog website, safe to say I was obsessed with this brand and its branding. It’s laugh out loud hilarious – I truly loled, as did the person I was sharing a room with, and as I’m sure anyone within eye- or ear-shot would...
London is awash with convenience stores – from the acrid yellow signage of Nisa to the misleadingly named ubiquity of Costcutter to the countless independents named things like Ben’s, despite the fact they have nothing to do with anybody called Ben. Such shops – reliably there at most times of day, reliably overpriced (hence the convenience I suppose, like an...
The best branding and packaging projects – or at least the ones that most excite this slightly jaded old design hack – are those that not only take a category and do something genuinely innovative within it, but the ones that rethink structure as much as style. The identity for Eat Dirt does all that and more, and so safe...