Goolf brand identity

Goolf is a matchmaking app that’s designed to connect fellow golfers with one another, aimed at both amateur and experienced players – or anyone interested in hitting the fairways. The brand commissioned Wildish & Co to help bring the sport’s old-school reputation up to date and appeal to newer players.

The revamped branding incorporates a vintage illustrative style, taking inspiration from historic golfing iconography and 1970s crazy golf. The logo is one of the most striking elements, featuring a curving ‘G’ that nods to both the shape of a golf course and the cartoonish flight of a golf ball.

The typography used in the header is inspired by classic golf scoreboards, with an Inter Bold typeface chosen for flexibility. A brighter, techier green was chosen for the lead colour, complemented by a more vibrant overall palette, while the photography direction gives a more relaxed sense of the sport.

Credits:
Goolf
Category: Brand Identity, Rebrand
Entrant: Wildish & Co
Design Studio: Wildish & Co
Creative Director: Jake Allnutt
Designer: Alisha Mann
Brand Partner: Harm Kerkhof
Producer: Andy Churlish
Illustrator: David Roberts

Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity brand identity

The studio describes the letter as “a symbol that embodies infinite curiosity in its dynamic configurations”, able to “shift its gaze in order to observe its context, emphasise content, and carry on the Eames legacy of spirited discovery”. It’s part of a flexible design system that supports the institute’s ambition to use Eames’ design philosophy to encourage contemporary designers to solve the world’s problems.

Manual’s branding stretches across digital, physical, experiential, and editorial, with the logo displaying its more anthropomorphic qualities in motion, where it’s designed to be “always looking, always observing”. Everything is rooted in the work of the duo, with type choices and colour palettes drawn from pieces created by the pair and stored in the archive.

Credits:
Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity
Category: Brand Identity, Launch
Entrant: Manual
Design Studio: Manual
Creative Director: Tom Crabtree
Client Director: Patricia Callaway
Project Managers: Sheila Azadan, Astrid Fedel
Design Director: Frank Lionetti
Art Director: Tanner Irwin
Designers: Nathan Fyock, Daniel Surgeon, Alireza Jajarmi

Prepare to get Tango’d

Despite being banned at one point and causing a rise in incidents of school playground slapping, it became one of the most memorable ad campaigns ever.

Since then, Tango has never quite gone as wacky in its advertising, although VCCP London’s Tanguru 2019 campaign, where sticky situations were resolved with one swig of the drink, did contain echoes of the brand’s former silliness. 

Now though, VCCP is back again with a new spot for Tango that sets out to rekindle that zany, British humour of ads gone by and gain a new generation of fans. 

Directed by Ben Tonge and produced by Girl&bear, the 60-second comedic spot sees police raid a Tango lab and discover all the ingredients needed to make new flavour Tango Dark Berry. Along the way, a police officer succumbs to a drop of the good stuff and finds he can’t stop dancing as a result.

Credits:
Agency: VCCP London
Creative Directors: George Wait, Mark Orbine
Director: Ben Tonge
Production Company: Girl&Bear

The New York Times’ ads take us down the rabbit hole

The New York Times has launched a new brand campaign that takes the ‘six degrees of separation’ concept – the theory that everyone on earth is only several connections away from anyone else – and applies it to journalistic storytelling.

Led by Droga5 NY, the campaign, called More of Life Brought to Life, is told through three key films directed by Mackenzie Sheppard. The title of each film – Sneakers, Gravity, and Time – is used as a starting point for an unexpected learning journey, the message being: chip beneath the surface and there’s no end to where a reader’s curiosity can take them.

Credits:
Agency: Droga5 NY
CCO: Scott Bell
ECDs: Laurie Howell, Toby Treyer-Evans
Creatives: Sara Buchnick, Ben Muckensturm, Aaron Araya, Ross Weaver, Ian Hart, Charlotte Simons, Melanie Reichert
Production Company: Bonaparte
Co-Production: ProdCo
Director: Mackenzie Sheppard
Post, VFX: The Mill NY

Celebrating the creative power of the concert poster

Creating an iconic concert poster is a tough brief for any designer. Tasked with taking the fleeting experience of live music and turning it into something tangible, a great poster design has the power to transport you back to the moment you saw your favourite artist perform.

Echo is a new book from Vermont-based music venue Higher Ground that seeks to demonstrate just how that creative magic is captured, featuring a collection of over 350 concert posters which celebrate the intersection of art and music.

Kamasi Washington

Busta Rhymes

Over the last 25 years, Higher Ground has built a reputation for identifying and attracting both rising stars as well as musical legends, often putting on more than 600 events a year.

St Vincent

Cat Power

The book is designed to look like a stack of silkscreened posters bound into a book. Inside its pages, readers will find interviews with Jager himself and Alex Crothers, founder and co-owner of Higher Ground, along with anecdotes on individual posters and a deep dive into the art of silkscreen printing.

A delicate identity for the World of Wedgwood

SomeOne has created a new visual identity for the World of Wedgwood, the home of the historic pottery brand based near Stoke-on-Trent.

Visitors to the World of Wedgwood can meet the people who craft the intricate pieces, and elsewhere on site, there is a gin distillery, shops, a tearoom decked out in Wedgwood, a fine dining restaurant, and a V&A collection featuring archive pieces.

The new identity showcases the brand’s signature Wedgwood blue colour – a light blue developed by founder Josiah Wedgwood while experimenting with his ‘jasper’ stoneware. This is accompanied by complementary colours that are designed to feel seasonal, and others that work year-round.

The art direction for the photography is restrained but feels in keeping with tasteful interior or beauty brands, making the most of textures associated with pottery, including powder, paint, clay, bone china, and slip (clay particles suspended in water).

As part of the project, SomeOne also created a set of illustrations inspired by the lines formed in clay on a potter’s wheel, as well as a verbal identity that aims to “invigorate” the historic brand.

It would have been all too easy to lean into typical heritage or craft aesthetics here, yet the new identity manages to gently push the World of Wedgwood in a more thoughtful direction.

Wise’s new branding reflects its shift in direction

Founded in 2011, Wise has long sought to challenge the financial status quo. Previously known as TransferWise (it dropped the first part of its name in 2021), the foreign exchange fintech allows people and businesses to move money between countries as well as spending money abroad.

Today, over 16 million people and businesses use Wise, saving them £1.5 billion compared to traditional banking fees last year alone. As it continues to make it easier and cheaper for more people in more places to use their money, the fintech decided its branding needed to better reflect its work.

Wise approached branding agency Ragged Edge to create its new visual identity. Rooted in the idea ‘The World’s Money’, the branding sees its existing wordmark and Fast Flag icon subtly recrafted for better legibility.

The agency decided to move away from the blue hue that has become a fintech convention over the last decade. Instead, green is now the core brand colour, in a nod to Wise’s previous green hued card.

A clear and confident tone of voice has been developed to be understood instantly by anyone in any language, while a new bespoke typeface, Wise Sans, incorporates letterforms inspired by scripts from across the globe.

The identity also introduces a new distinctive asset, described by Ragged Edge as a set of “graphic tapestries”, which fuses colour, imagery and texture to form a striking background for how the brand shows up both on and offline.

The design system is intended to be one of the most accessible in the world, supporting over 146 languages. Every design decision, including testing over 200 colour options, was made to exceed the standard requirements of WCAG 3.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).

Given the scale of the project, Ragged Edge and Wise decided to adapt the traditional client-agency relationship, functioning as one team throughout the process. The agency’s creative director, Luke Woodhouse, says: “It ensured the results will flow through every part of the business and product, for the maximum possible impact.”

Cleancult’s new branding heroes the refillable

Robot Food was briefed to design branding that would counter any confusion around this, and make the refill/reuse process clear from the get-go. The Leeds-based studio created a series of central pack icons that hero each product’s ‘refillable glass partner’.

Another challenge was to lean into the ‘cult’ part of the brand name whilst avoiding the more challenging associations of the word. The team utilised a range of graphic devices such as symbols and a decorative logotype, and balanced this out with an overall feeling of playfulness.

The logomark in question is composed of shapely lettering, paired with a star-shaped glint that serves as “the finishing touch, the gleam in the clean”. Other graphic elements used in the branding, such as sunshine-esque rays, emphasise Cleancult’s “positive, aspirational elements”. Robot Food added in sans serif font Brandon Grotesque for body copy, and semi-serif font Nazare for titles.

The studio was equally playful with the brand’s tone of voice, expressing the more serious sustainable messaging through slightly tongue-in-cheek copy. Finally, the simple yet striking blue and white colour palette evokes a feeling of freshness and communicates the efficacy, with bold secondary colours used to represent different scents.

“With cleaning products, one way or another it can feel like you have to make a sacrifice – between conventional and natural, eco-friendly and tough on germs, lemony freshness versus dried out hands,” says Jess Cook, client director at Robot Food. “We wanted to show Cleancult as the full solution – something we can trust without fearing we’ve made the wrong choice for ourselves, or the planet.”

The Working Assembly gives Marin Living Foods a fluid new logo

Back in 2012, when plant-based milk was still a burgeoning market, it was hard to find an alternative that was additive and filler-free. This struggle inspired California-based chef Gaina Lieu to found her own plant-based milk company called Marin Living Foods, whose mission for over a decade now has been to provide the most natural and high-quality almond milk.

In an attempt to disrupt the alternative milk category, Lieu reached out to award-winning creative agency The Working Assembly to rebrand Marin Living Foods and help it stand out from competitors in terms of visuals as well as quality.

“The Working Assembly really nailed the brief, giving our beloved brand a fresh and much needed redesign,” explains Lieu. “Our premium small batch nut milks are so much more than the plant-based alternatives out there, and they really highlighted the differentiation in all of their strategy, copy and visual identity work.”

At the core of the rebrand is a new wordmark that uses custom script to mirror the fluidity of milk and contribute to a brand-wide playfulness through movement and motion. Here, clear legibility of the brand name is sacrificed slightly in favour of aesthetic distinction — even if you’re not sure what the fluid type says, it certainly stands out on the shelf.

This is further aided by a simple yet bold colour palette that helps to foreground the wordmark on the bottle. Pink, green, brown and off-white hint at the flavours of the respective milks (which include matcha, berry goji, and ube, among others) whilst juxtaposing nicely with the expressive type design.

Finally, the brand’s playful attitude is established through a “confident, cheeky, and strong” tone of voice that draws attention and highlights the quality of the products in a knowingly boastful way — ‘Defiantly Delicious’ reads the brand’s unofficial tagline, while one of its OOH adverts proudly declares: “Our bold flavours make the almond milk aisle a little less vanilla.”

Freeform’s rebrand reflects its commitment to new perspectives

Collins has worked with Monotype to create a new variable cut of Neue Haas Grotesk, which allows letters to twist, shift and wrap around themselves. It makes for striking branding when used in static imagery, but really comes to life in motion – which feels fitting for Freeform’s new positioning as a streaming service. Collins says it’s “a voice that invites you to look again and again”.

The forms of the type are echoed in other graphic elements, for example cut-out signage boards, windows onto characters, and stills from shows. Lettering is paired with a bright colour palette, that pits hot pink and slime green against more sedate tones of maroon, navy blue and forest green.

Freeform’s backstory is as twisty as its new branding, launching in the late 70s as a religious channel and undergoing various changes in name and ownership before becoming Freeform in 2016. According to Collins, its focus for the future isn’t just a young adult audience, but the kinds of stories that “are usually on the periphery”.