Orkest Phion – or Phion Symphony Orchestra in English – is a Dutch travelling symphony orchestra that was formed in 2019 through the merger of the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra and Het Gelders Orkest. Based in the eastern Netherlands, it operates across the provinces of Gelderland and Overijssel, performing in different cities and venues rather than from a single permanent concert...
This is an identity that’s not very easy to instantly get your head around – arguably, at a glance, it’s downright confusing. Sometimes it comes on strong all antiquey – like the branding equivalent of once-beloved UK high-street also-ran Past Times – at others, it’s all Trewley Precious lash brand partnership, all hearts and dusky pink and half-arsed girly girly...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
Dataforeningen simply translates as ‘data organisation’ from Norwegian to English, and funnily enough, that’s exactly what the organisation is. Operating nationwide across Norway serving people working in tech, it was looking for a new identity that reflected a shift in who and what it was, and its future aims. Taking on this potentially tricky brief was Oslo-based Bielke & Yang...
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...
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...
Dallas connotes many things: cowboys! (the gun-slingin’, yeehawin’ type ones on horseback); cowboys! (the cheerleading ones of ‘that show on Netflix’ fame); cowboys! (the American football team). In short, for people like me who’ve never been to Dallas, nor indeed any of Texas, and who know next to nothing about sport, Dallas = cowboys, and perhaps little else. But even...