Typography

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 South merges rigour and ridiculousness in the best way possible in its superb identity for noodle joint Oodles

There’s so much to love about this identity – not least that it manages to make a noodle joint look like a perennially hip skate brand (yes, I am obviously talking about Supreme – all no-nonsense stocky black lettering on postbox red backgrounds). The identity in question is that for the delectably named Oodles – more on that moniker shortly...

Mucca makes New York supermarket company Fairway’s everyday essentials anything but basic

Founded in 1933, Fairway Market is an independent regional supermarket chain with stores across New York. The grocery retailer sells food and household goods, and over the past eight decades or so has built its reputation on an unusually broad selection of hard-to-find products and a distinctly New York character. As well as selling a number of different brands, Fairway...

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...

Perky Bros puts restrained Southern hospitality before shouty branding in its identity for Tennessee resort Southall

Branding parlance often deifies qualities like ‘boldness’ – being ‘brave’, ‘zigging when others zag’, ‘disruption,’ and so on and so forth. Some projects, however, demand and deserve the absolute opposite; the sign of a good designer, perhaps, is to intuitively know which one is which. This is one such project. Southall is resort set across 325 acres just outside Franklin,...

Vans didn’t need reinventing – Accept & Proceed’s new brand identity understands that

I love my Vans almost literally to death: the little black, three-hole plimsolls are so well-loved that there are holes in both big toes, and on the right side, actual horizontal tears across the top. They’re sun-bleached to the point of almost unrecognition, holey as hell, ripped up and yet still, so unbelievably comfortable that I can’t bear to part...

All Purpose ditches wine clichés in its lurid new identity for natural wine importer Ancestrel

Based in leafy yummy-mummyish south London enclave Forest Hill, Ancestrel (yes that’s a deliberate misspelling) is a wine shop and so much more – it’s proudly the first company in the UK to import natural wine. Having started life in 2016, Ancestrel has spent the decade since making a name for itself as a renowned importer, wholesaler, and retailer of...

Pentagram nails controlled chaos in its identity for Manhattan “shophouse” style Thai restaurant LenLen

It’s not easy to make an identity look genuinely effortless – more often than not, the very intention to do so renders the result looking the exact opposite. And nothing, no one, ever wants to be levelled with the accusation of appearing to be ‘trying too hard’. However, Pentagram New York’s partner Andrea Trabucco-Campos and team has succeeded in that...

Coca-Cola’s new identity by JKR proves that sometimes the smartest rebrand is barely a rebrand at all

It’s hard to think of a bigger name client than Coca-Cola: the brand is so huge that it’s become a shorthand for anything meaning ‘global mega-corp’. Its reach is so vast, its history so firmly cemented in culture that it practically owns a certain combination of red and white; a specific sort of alliterative script serif type. Even its bottle...

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...

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...