Welly is a company that sells premium and fun first aid bandages and other essentials. For the identity they use a customised stencil version of DSType’s Leitura Display Italic together with Leitura News and Commercial Type’s Styrene A for the product tagline and descriptions. Welly worked with Prime Studio on product design and Partners & Spade on brand and identity.

The Freaky Cookie is a quirky, playful, boldness startup in Southern California (USA) specialized in tasty candies, crazy pies, and colorful cookies.

Berton Hasebe’s Platform is used throughout the identity. The logo is based on Platform Bold, featuring shaded letterforms with partly patterned fills in alternating colors. C and e have been rotated.

Judy is an emergency-preparedness startup company that has prepared a collection of “Ready for Anything” kits and resource tools for individuals and families when they need it most. The company launched in 2020 and uses Sharp Grotesk for its logotype and branding.

Judy’s typography emphasizes the all caps, bold, 25 width of Sharp Grotesk. The type paired with a vibrant orange, black, and white color scheme make for a simple, impactful, and straight-to-the-point identity. Each kit includes an assortment of products labeled with Sharp Grotesk across several key categories: first aid, warmth, safety, food, water, and tools. On the website, Sharp Grotesk is combined with LL Akkurat.

Read and see more images on Sharp Type News.

Byte Bars is a brand of delish snacks from Denver, Colorado. The identity conceived by Cast Iron Design is based on mouth and tongue illustrations, a vibrant color palette, and the Cheee typeface by James Edmondson. Cast Iron Design writes:

Competing in a saturated snack bar market, we developed a strategy for Byte Bars that subverts stereotypical “crunchy granola” aesthetics. Cheee by Oh no Type Co. was used for all of the brand’s wordmarks and featured prominently on the packaging—lending the brand a youthful irreverence. Hobeaux—also created by James T. Edmondson—was used as a display face to support the brands’ illustrative logos. Anchor by Process Type fits right in with its round letterforms. The condensed nature of Anchor also helped with the challenges of designing a small package.

Representing a cross-generational, free-spirited vibe, the shapes of the type and icons are influenced by the groovy 1960s and the vivid color palette is drawn from the electric poppiness of the 80s and early 90s.

See additional images in their case study.

Editor’s note: This post was first published in September 2018, showing preliminary designs. It was greatly revised with additional info and images of the implemented brand in January 2020.

The Flower Collective is a cannabis company based in the small mountain town of Nederland, Colorado. After transitioning from medical to recreational cannabis, they tasked us with creating branding and packaging that would help them stand out on the shelf and reflect their company’s sustainable values.

A wide range of collateral was created for the Flower Collective making the two different cuts of Styrene — Styrene A and Styrene B — quite useful. Stratos was employed in all caps as a companion typeface. Eckmanpsych was used on a tie-dye shirt and in the concentrate packaging.

Packaging

Haus is a new low-alcohol aperitif created by Helena Price Hambrecht and Woody Hambrecht. The brand was launched in June 2019 along with their first drink, Citrus & Flower; the first batch sold out within a day. The identity was designed by Kelsey Lim at Gin Lane.

Haus is a direct-to-consumer beverage, and it is clear that pains were taken to make the ordering, shipping, and unboxing of the beverage just as much a part of the experience as actually drinking it.

The logo is set in Roslindale, customized with tighter spacing and a ligated u-s pair. Normally I would worry that a logo with high contrast would suffer at small sizes, but this logo is always large and in charge: it is the dominant design element on the bottle (where the H is 226pt tall!), not to mention the box, the printed editorial inserts, and the webpage.

As designer Kelsey Lim says about the type selection:

Similar to Roslindale, the inspiration for Haus has roots in Europe but has been reenvisioned for a new audience. We wanted the Haus brand to feel simultaneously modern and timeless—and Roslindale captures that duality. It's both old and new, elegant but indisputably bold.

With Roslindale also in use for large headlines, GT America rounds out the identity. The Extended width is used for subheads, and the normal width is used for text.

Editorial inserts

Website

Ingredients, editorial insert

Website

Website (mobile samples)

Editorial insert

Shipper

Shipper

In mid 2017, Pinterest introduced a new logo, using the bold style of Neue Haas Grotesk Display for the wordmark, with round dots and some minor modifications (see comments). Neue Haas Grotesk is also used on the corporate pages of the website, in Text and Display styles (the consumer website specifies sans-serif system fonts).

In 2018, Pinterest collaborated with Kurppa Hosk:

The result […] was a brand story built from Pinterest’s vision of “Unlocking Creativity”. This vision describes the brand’s desire to inspire people to create – regardless of gender and whatever their field of interest. The updated visual identity articulates this story by providing broader visual opportunities with a graphic interpretation of “the pin”, itself, as the core idea. The typography, iconography and illustrations depict the essence of Pinterest by using the dynamics between small and large, colorful and playful. All together a concept that embraces Pinterest’s creative universe and inclusivity – open to everybody, everywhere.

The corporate pages of the Pinterest website use Neue Haas Grotesk with its alternate round dots.

From Dropbox:

As our mission has evolved from keeping files in sync to helping keep teams in sync, we realized our brand needs to change, too. Our new brand system shows that Dropbox isn’t just a place to store your files—it’s a living workspace that brings teams and ideas together. The look is expressive, with vibrant colors, rich imagery, a versatile typeface, and playful illustrations.

No longer content with being a place where you put, and sometimes share, your digital junk, Dropbox is now a digi-creative condenser. Copy aside, the design team (along with Instrument, Collins, Animade, XXIX and Sharp Type) managed to think outside the box and get away from the Silicon Valley consensus à la blue-white, flush-flat design. The new identity is presented through an elaborate minisite that starts out with mission statements and typograpical explanations, before exploring into animation and illustration.

Speaking of typography, Dropbox now featues Sharp Grotesk — and lots of it, 259 different fonts to be exact. While the use of such a wide palette might seem unruly, that is also the point. The typeface carries with it more than enough character to still feel coherent, making sense in both user interface and Animade’s whacky gifs.

With 259 fonts, our new typeface Sharp Grotesk gives us lots of versa­tility, allowing us to “speak” in a variety of tones. Take a look at the gif to get a better idea.

Our new system lets us pick the right amount of expressiveness for the situation. Color can go from a standard Dropbox blue to “whoa.” Same for type, photography, and illustration. In a marketing campaign, we can dial things up to provoke and inspire creative energy. But in our product, where people need to concentrate on their work, we can dial it down.

Founded in 2005 by Kurdish businessman Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani is the #1-selling strained yogurt (Greek-style) brand in the United States. The logo is set in Broadband, an early digital font by Grant Hutchinson, inspired by Neville Brody’s Insignia. Other material is set in Neutraface No. 2 and ITC Stone Informal.

January 2016 product brochure.

January 2016 product brochure.

Chobani Soho Cafe in New York.

Chobani Soho Cafe in New York.

Chobani Soho Cafe in New York.

Chobani Soho Cafe in New York.

Created by London-based DesignStudio, the new Airbnb logotype is set in LL Brown. The website and all other identity materials, including the mobile apps, use LL Circular.

The previous logo was a bubbly Bello.

Airbnb blog, narrow view.

Airbnb blog, wide view.

Logo symbol introduction video.

Airbnb advertising.

Aribnb homepage.

Airbnb mobile homepage.

Current Tumblr logo, redrawn for 2013.

From 2007 to 2013, the logo for blogging platform Tumblr was Bookman Old Style with very little adjustment. Considering that Bookman dates back to 1860, the mark looked remarkably contemporary. The glassy fill and occassional bubbly outline had something to do with that, but even without the effects it felt pretty fresh. Chalk it up to a super-tight, all-lowercase setting.

Around the time of their Yahoo! acquisition in mid-2013, the company refined its logo, redrawing the letters for an even tighter, more customized fit. The ‘t’ was narrowed, the ‘u’ lost its leading serif, the arm of the ‘r’ extends just a bit further, and the ‘u’ and ‘m’ curves were given a smoother connection to the stems, resulting in rounder (perhaps friendlier) counter shapes.

Tumblr’s April 2007 dashboard redesign.

The Tumblr homepage in May 2007. Looking back at this in 2013, with today’s design trends firmly in flatland, it appears that the pendulum of style took about six years to swing.

Tumblr’s October 2007 dashboard redesign said farewell to the Davidville flower.

Tumblr homepage, 2011. The glossy Bookman logo survived virtually unchanged from 2007 to 2013. Only the spacing got tighter (period no longer straying from the word), shadows varied slightly, and shapes were fine tuned.

Tumblr dashboard, 2011.

Outline/sticker variation of the logo, introduced sometime in 2009.

eBay:

Why is eBay introducing a new logo?
Seventeen years ago, eBay created a new way for people to buy and sell. Since that time, we’ve enabled millions of people to launch their own businesses, and helped change the way the world shops for things they need and love. We’re pleased to introduce our refreshed logo. It reflects who we are today — a global online marketplace that offers a cleaner, more contemporary and consistent experience.

When and where will I see the new logo?
The new logo will go live on our sites and appear in advertising and marketing campaigns in mid-October

Like eBay’s current mark, the type for the new logo and other examples here is Univers, Adrian Frutiger’s ground-breaking Neo-Grotesque that was released at about the same time as Helvetica but is far less popular today. Perhaps that’s why it has the potential to feel fresh. The new mark is also much more straightforward, eschewing the goofy, overlapping assemblage of various Univers widths. Still, I’m not sure if the new look is really the big jump forward they are looking for. Like Microsoft’s recent update, it’s a pretty tame approach, typical of a mainstream brand.

This news came to us via Reed Reeder, who asks if we should now refer to the company as “ebay” without the cap ‘B’. But their current logo is “ebaY” and has been ever since 1997 when they changed their name to “eBay”.