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Ambassaden by Bleed
Designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, the Ambassaden’s angular modernist stature holds a striking presence in the heart of Oslo. When it opened in 1959, it functioned as the US embassy until its closure in the early 2000s. Fast-forward to today – the building has been reopened and its programming altered. It now operates as a multi-functional space that includes...
Full Pin by Rethink
Since 2020, engineers-turned-mushroom entrepreneurs Vathana Len and Daniel Vogt have been growing the fanciest mushrooms I’ve ever seen, from their shiny urban greenhouse in Montreal. From Pholiote adipeuse to King eryngii (I don’t know what those are either) and everything in between, Full Pin’s mushrooms are cultivated with meticulous precision and at an impressive rate – over 700 pounds per...
Rolus by Re
Back in the early 00s – the era when arguably Hollyoaks was at its zenith, and bellybutton piercings their most bejeweled – Botox was gradually emerging from the hushed clinics of Harley Street and LA to become part of common parlance. As such, brands cottoned on to the word’s ‘eternal youth’ connotations: I distinctly remember a shampoo ad promising that...
TwelveLabs by Pentagram
Remember when the conversation around gradients was about making ‘bad’ design look ‘better’? When RGB colours were frowned upon because you couldn’t print them? Yeah, those ideas feel a bit outdated now. HP Indigo can now run fluorescents affordably, and business card mock-ups (in RGB) are more about selling than printing. Technology marches on, expectations and standards evolve, and everything...
Ten by Paul Belford Ltd
I’ve been writing about the work of Paul Belford Ltd. (Next Chapter, Spudos & Social Enterprise) for very nearly fifteen years. Initially, and admittedly, the articles practically wrote themselves, which was ideal for a self-taught designer with very little experience but keen to take an approach to learning that was very much my own. That was to write about a...
Hip Pop by Robot Food
Running a design blog sharpens your eye for category conventions. Stick with it long enough, though, and you’ll start to see those conventions unravel. What once felt fixed begins to flex. This creates a challenge for writing about design: you’re constantly assessing the landscape, but that landscape is always shifting. Take minimalism, for example. Once the dominant aesthetic of the...
Yaté by Herefor
Long gone are the days when ‘energy drink’ connoted unwashed teenage gamers, amped up Twitch streamers, hungover/still going city boys on the Tube, or 2-4-1 deals on vodka Red Bull in sticky-floored suburban student nightclubs. Like many things – such as reading books, going for a walk, or having a bath – the energy drink sphere has now collided with...
Helions by Pentagram
HELIONS… now that sounds impressive. Something to do with helium atoms and stellar fusion, the force that powers stars? Or perhaps it’s invoking Helios, the Greek god of the sun, blazing his chariot across the sky? Nope – it’s actually a tribute to Helions Bumpstead in Essex, a beneficiary of the British gift for naming that also gave us Pratt’s...
Fuku by Red Antler
Fuku (no sniggering at the back please) is a ‘fine brining establishment’ – i.e. some sort of eatery, you can safely assume – specialising in a specific type of chicken ‘sando’, or in normal language, ‘sandwich’. According to Red Antler, the Brooklyn based design agency behind Fuku’s branding, ‘the Fuku sando first hit the scene as a secret menu item...
ROM by Leo Burnett
Okay, let’s get it out of the way… yes, there are elements of Pentagram’s 2018 Library of Congress in Leo Burnett’s work for the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). In both projects, type is a frame for images of archive material. Is it BP&O’s responsibility to acknowledge similarities in all the work we publish, tracking a typology back to the start...
Saaristo by Bond
‘Saaristo’ is the generic term for ‘archipelago’ in Finnish, but – to the outside world – it’s sufficiently distinctive to refer to the entire region in Western Finland, which now makes up a new tourism brand. This brand intends to generate more interest in (and visitors to) the world’s largest archipelago: a collection of 40,000 islands. This scale makes it...
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