The design features bold photography of the collection alongside clean and simple use of typography. It joins a current trend within museum and arts branding for a stripped-back, modern approach which aims to attract new audiences and throw off any stuffy associations of the past.
A new symbol for the gallery has been created which is based on an original sketch by its first director, Sir George Scharf, who entwined and encircled ‘NPG’ in a workbook, dated 1893. Discovered in the archive, this sketch has been transformed by the illustrator and typographer, Peter Horridge, known for his logos and crests for everyone from the Royal Household and King Charles III to Liverpool Football Club.
The new logo joins other uses of the initials NPG throughout the gallery’s building, within the metalwork of railings, embossed onto furniture, and as part of original mosaics.
Founded in 2014, checkout platform Bolt offers one-click payments for over 300 retailers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in a time of ever-increasing convenience, the company has raised millions of dollars in investment, taking it to the level of a ‘decacorn’ – that’s a startup with a value of $10b+, for readers outside the world of venture capital.
The tech company brought Koto in to overhaul its visual identity and create something that could grab attention in a competitive landscape of “somewhat bland sans-serif wordmarks”, according to Koto creative director Arthur Foliard.
“There was a huge and unprecedented opportunity to stand out from the crowd and to bring more personality into a pretty expected space,” he tells CR. “There’s a reason behind it. Most of these brands want to look secure, but you don’t need to be bland to feel trustworthy. By prioritising feeling safe they all feel the same.”
Even the tail of the @ sign includes a spiky edge, thanks to a bespoke typeface by PangramPangram. In total, says Foliard, there’s 15 electrified glyphs, chosen as the characters users would see most often.
Branding agency Mucho revealed the early stages of Visa’s brand evolution 2 summer ago, and the financial services company last year launched the full update to its brand identity system. The agency highlighted that “to most people, Visa has been synonymous with credit and debit cards”, and one of the key aims of the new branding was to “ensure it is seen as more than a credit card company”.
Based on 200 hours of stakeholder conversations, the agency also developed a new mission statement for Visa that leans into brand purpose: “We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere.” This philosophy is tied into the brand symbol, an equals sign, which has been extracted from the recognisable bars that were historically used in the Visa logo lock up prior to 2005. “The symbol has always been there – we just dialed into the opportunity to use it in a creative way,” said Mucho creative director Rob Duncan.
Key to the new branding system was establishing consistency worldwide while helping the existing design elements – such as the Visa wordmark – work harmoniously in digital environments, adjusting colour palettes to work better on digital touchpoints (namely small mobile screens) as part of this.
The agency developed an iconography and illustration system, brought together by the Visa colours (shown below), and worked with Commercial Type on a new typeface, Visa Dialect, which was designed with legibility in digital executions in mind. Mucho also focused on enhancing Visa’s B2B standing with a sleek range of assets using motion design, made with the help of creative studio Field.io.
I had the pleasant to digital draw up this logo design. Fox & Holly have rebranded all there handmade crafts under one logo rather than multiple different logo creating a stronger identity.
Launched in 2015, Monzo is heralded for breaking the curse of dry, corporate brands in the personal banking sector. Its uplifting colours, down-to-earth voice and intuitive experience marked a clean break with the traditional banks, winning over a generation of millennials and beyond.
The new identity centres on the coral hue that made Monzo stand out in the first place, supported by ‘deep navy’ and ‘soft white’, and a wider secondary palette. Colours have been dialled up in the M logomark, which will be rolled out in touchpoints such as the app icon, though the shape of the logomark remains unchanged.
In terms of typography, the friendly, rounded Oldschool Grotesk was chosen as the display typeface, while a custom version of Universal Sans – Monzo Sans – will be used as the primary typeface for functional purposes.
A “warmer” approach has similarly been taken to the art direction and brand photography, as well as a suite of illustrations created by Ola Dobrzyńska.
As Good Club has grown and its ambitions have changed, the team commissioned Nice and Serious to find a look and feel that was more upbeat and eye-catching, and the updated visuals are certainly hard to ignore. A bold primary colour palette of pink and red gives the brand a sense of fun and friendliness, while secondary colours, such as blue, purple and yellow, add extra vibrancy to packaging and imagery.
This palette is accompanied by an array of endearing illustrations by artist Anthony Orozco that include silhouettes of refillable food items on pot labels, and a cast of playful brand mascots composed of the pots themselves. Encouraging potential and existing customers to utilise Dizzie’s refill options – a core part of the company’s mission and a bigger focus this time around – was one of the main objectives for Nice and Serious.
Speaking of the challenge, the agency’s creative director, Peter Larkin, says, “We wanted to elevate the experience out of the eco-clichés, and onto the shelves of everyday customers across the UK…. From the simplified product illustrations through to the Dizzie ‘whoosh’ and brand mascot, we created an identity full of movement and character.”
Finally, to reinforce the idea that refills can be fun, rewarding, and hassle-free, the agency developed an upbeat tone of voice to reflect this: “For the tone of voice, we set out to conjure up those little joyful moments that are totally unique to the refill experience,” explains Larkin. “So whilst being familiar (and sometimes frank) was important, it also meant using words to surprise and satisfy. Our motto was to channel ‘written ASMR’.”
Kathrein Privatbank is a private bank in Austria, aimed at helping its clients to better manage their finances and ultimately “better live their narrative”. To do so, it offers a highly personalised experience through its range of products and services.
&Walsh drew on the bank’s Austrian heritage for its visual identity, in particular the art movement Vienna Secession – which took place in the country at the turn of the 20th century. Its members rejected ‘traditional’ art styles, and promoted a move towards more unified disciplines of painting, architecture and sculpture. Founding figures included artist Gustav Klimt, architect Joseph Maria Olbrich, and designer Koloman Moser.
&Walsh’s identity reflects society’s collective reevaluation of money – with many individuals now seeking specific values and narratives, rather than just pure financial gain. Potential customers may be drawn to the fact that Kathrein Privatbank invests in “sustainable solutions, artificial intelligence, and the arts”, and as such, these three areas are reflected in marble sculptures designed by &Walsh.
“In the identity, we focused on bringing forward Kathrein’s Austrian roots in combination with their deep commitment to personalisation to separate them from their larger international competitors,” says Jessica Walsh, founder of the studio.
Every four years, the world watches on as the next host country of the Olympic Games is announced. The anticipation surrounding that announcement is closely followed by the reveal of the design identity for each Games – an occasion that gets designers talking as much as the general public.
The design heritage for the Olympic Games is so illustrious that it’s easy to forget that the Olympics has a brand of its own to look after. And since the last development of its identity, in 2011, the organisation’s needs have evolved, explains May Guerraoui, the IOC’s head of brand management. So began an extensive process to evolve the brand, which has been revealed through a gradual rollout, and is expected to be implemented in full by the Paris 2024 Games.
The Olympic colours – second only to the iconic interlocking rings in terms of recognisability – have been “subtly optimised” to have more impact and flexibility, she explains. These have been joined by an extended palette of complementary colours reflecting the gold, silver and bronze medals, to be used for cases like data visualisation and infographics.
Illustration by Abbey Lossing
“Art and creativity have played a big role in Olympic history, and not only in the iconic Olympic Games’ design. From 1912 to 1948, art competitions were held alongside sport – with Olympic medals awarded to architects, poets and artists,” Guerraoui says. “We wanted to bring this idea of championing the arts back into the brand identity.”
Olympic Sans was designed by Fabian Harb; Olympic Serif was designed by Seb McLauchlanImage: Naoya Suzuki
“For example, we have put the athletes at the heart of the evolved identity system with the Field of Play (FOP) design, a graphic system that expresses the Olympic brand through colour and geometry inspired by the Games,” Guerraroui says, from courts to tracks to lanes. “It was a way to incorporate the Games into the brand in a timeless way, without featuring a specific athlete or moment in a way that a photo would for instance.”
Casavo is a digital platform for buying and selling homes, offering a mix of properties from trusted agents, as well as houses acquired by Casavo directly. To date the focus has been on properties in Italy, Spain and Portugal, however a recent round of investment means the business is now expanding across Europe.
DesignStudio has rebranded the company to reflect its global – or ‘glocal’ as they describe it – scope, as well as its ambitions to evolve from a home-buying platform to a full digital solution for sellers and buyers. The new identity also had to speak to a broad range of consumers, spanning several generations of potential clients.
Casavo’s previously blue and pink, sans serif wordmark has been replaced with a more characterful, black and orange version – designed to flex across Casavo’s online and offline presence. The rebrand includes subtly different palettes of neutrals, blues and greens for brokers and buyers, however orange plays the starring role, appearing prominently on Casavo’s website and app.
DesignStudio has also introduced a suite of new monoline illustrations, depicting symbolic motifs of roofs and trees in Casavo’s outdoor ads. Photography feels more lifestyle than your traditional real estate agent, showing happy people sprawled on sofas and beds.
Following the brand’s acquisition by Asos as part of a £330 million deal that also included Miss Selfridge and activewear brand Hiit, the teams behind both Topshop and Topman have been steadily evolving them into digital-first businesses.
Helping them to stand out among the ecommerce giant’s roughly 900 stocked brands, they now have their own designated ‘shop front’ – or landing page – to better appeal to fashion-conscious shoppers looking for inspiration.
“The brief was bold and direct: to elevate the brand expression with a design system that honoured the spirit of Topshop and Topman’s iconic heritage, whilst introducing distinct new elements that could make that iconoclasm relevant and successful in today’s digital era and beyond,” says Moving Brands chief strategy officer, Christina-Anne Kyosti.
The agency’s stripped back approach to the identity appears to be an attempt to bridge the gap between the worlds of high street and high fashion once more, with a new monogram that nods to the brands’ shared heritage.
A new wordmark, designed with Colophon Foundry, is equally as minimalist. “Building out from the brands’ heritage of a sans serif logotype, we created a modern custom wordmark that confidently put an unapologetic, monolithic stamp on their new creative direction,” Konczak adds.
Graphic Design 