DutchScot, Orrery menu design

Also in this week’s Design Diary, our roundup of projects, events, and general design world news, we bring you some modern visual identity designs for a sparkling water that take cues from Canadian nostalgia, the newspaper that aimed to present the impartiail policy truths ahead of the recent UK general election, and more. For more along these lines (and so many others) you can follow along all day, every day on Instagram @AIGAeyeondesign, Facebook, and Twitter @AIGAeyeondesign.

Lala Albert, Seasonal Shift 

Seasonal Shift is the first collection of Lala Albert’s illustrated short stories, created between 2013 and 2019. The Brooklyn-based artist and textile designer’s work presented here often looks at how sci-fi and erotica intersect. According to publisher Breakdown Press, Albert’s comics are an expression of her “corporeal ambivalence”—feeling at odds with her body—and are underpinned by an examination of the masks we each wear to present ourselves to the world. “Depicting vulnerability, touch, and tender moments of contact between characters injects a sense of realism to Lala’s otherworldly imagery,” says Breakdown Press. “Ethereal, unsettling, and intimate, these genre-hopping examinations of identity and nature demonstrate that Albert is a master of the formally-inventive contemporary comic.”

DutchScot, Orrery branding

South London-based studio DutchScot was recently tasked with updating the branding for modern French restaurant Orrery, which was originally designed by Terrance Conran. The name is taken from the Orrery is a mechanical model of the Solar System that shows the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons, which also directly informed the branding. “For the logo, the letters orbit around the first letter of the name,” explains studio creative partner Ross Goulden.  “We then took stills during different stages of the movement and printed it on various business cards and other menus.” The name is set in the geometric slab serif called Beton, chosen for its elegance and perfectly circular ‘O,’ according to the studio.
The branding used across menus, stationary, and other touchpoints also references the circular way many of the dishes are presented, so DutchScot worked with Jemma Lewis to create a series of marbling prints that play off the colors and feel of various dishes. “On food menus, the marbling was printed within circles and came with small captions hinting back to one of the dishes on the menu,” Goulden explains. “The bar menu had a debossed panel to give the system some shape and the logo was foiled. Within the menu, the signature cocktails were presented with their own planets, again with the colors and feel to resemble the particular cocktail.”

Vanderbrand, Sapsucker branding

Toronto, Canada creative agency Vanderbrand recently launched its new work for Sapsucker, which is an “organic, plant-based, all-natural, and sustainably sourced tree water with no added sugar,” apparently. The agency looked to the fact that the drink is tapped from Canadian trees for its look and feel, which aimed to help it stand out in an increasingly competitive sparkling water market while being consistent across the brand identity, product naming, packaging, copywriting, digital applications, social media, and art direction. It decided to align the brand with the health and wellness markets, using “a witty tone and clever messaging” to establish a no-nonsense visual language.

“The brand identity for Sapsucker is strongly informed by its Canadian roots. The wordmark takes cues from Canadian nostalgia including local sport apparel and retail packaging,” says the team. Pairing the more historical-leaning Central Ave by Colophon Foundry with the modern edge of the Favorit Std Family by Dinamo meant the graphic language is appropriate for numerous scales and applications.

Rory Stiff, PoliticsvPolicies

We’d hazard a guess that December 13 really did feel more than unlucky for most UK (and likely global) readers of EoD with the re-election of Boris Johnson as PM, but that isn’t to say that numerous designers hadn’t been trying their damndest to make sure people were aware of the realities of the Tory (and other party) policies. One such creative was Rory Stiff, who decided to take things into his own hands upon realizing during his commute that “everyone around is being force-fed the same one sided politics from their billionaire-backed newspaper of choice.” He recognized that, in his words, “in reality this election was going to be decided upon lies, slander, and accusations rather than actually focusing on what the parties are promising to deliver to us.” As such, he pitched his idea for a simple publication that, as its name suggests, is focused simply on party policies. The only way he saw to take on the tabloids and biased free-sheets was “to fight them on their own ground.”

He collaborated with Casey-Highfield Smith (who he also worked with on the thiswayup.graphics project) to produce 10,000 newspapers that were distributed across London on Wednesday December 11, the day before the election, at all major transport links. The 16-page newspaper—created with Dominic Penna and Angus Williams, who provided the copy and edited down the party manifestos, and backed by Will Thacker and Andrew Barnard of 20Something—featured the top 14 policies from the six highest contesting parties in England, with key points from each of their responses to the policies. “All the points are taken straight from their manifestos—which after trawling through hundreds of pages, we knew no one would ever read—and then presented side by side, to allow the reader to compare the policies and make an informed opinion on what they want to vote on,” says Stiff. “The idea was to create a non-biased newspapers and pass the decision making over to the public.”