BP&O

Since starting life in 2008, Stack Overflow has functioned as a website/platform/forum that soon became a sort of internet go-to as a shared notebook or tool guide for programmers: somewhere they can ask questions, answer them, and have them answered by other actual real life people who’ve probably been there and done that, and want to impart the wisdom they’ve gleaned in doing so.

It’s never fun being negative about a project – it’s far more gratifying to show really great work, genuinely exciting or useful brands and organisations – and get under the skin of what makes them so. Obviously, a fair bit of this comes down to subjective taste; taking our own experiences and interpretations and cultural backgrounds and personalities and all that into the conversation.

Fjord is a new  floating sauna and cold-water plunge experience moored in San Francisco Bay’s Sausalito area. Rather than being exclusively positioned as a wellness-type experience, instead it looks to float, as it were, somewhere between architecture, hospitality and outdoor recreation. It’s a very modern take on the centuries-old tradition of saunas and how they’re used – the shift between heat and icy water – in this case, that of the Pacific Ocean and its surrounding chilly open air.

Built to survive repeated opening and closing, the graphics still look at home long after the olives have gone. It’s closer to something you’d keep on display than throw in the recycling. The lunchbox format brings decades of familiarity. We wrote our names on them, dented them and expected them to last. That history changes how the container is perceived before it’s even opened. Designing for a second life changes the design brief.

One of the more hilariously on the, er, nose identities I’ve seen in recent times here in the form of Pentagram New York’s work for Rugiet, a men’s health brand offering personalised, clinically-backed treatments sold exclusively online. Formerly better known as Rugiet Health, Rugiet was founded in Austin, Texas, in 2020 as a telehealth company.

JKR is perhaps – in recent-ish years at least – best known for its work with Burger King, undoubtedly one of the most oft-cited rebrands of the last decade in design circles. Then it did KFC; before that, the RSPCA, alongside a raft of other household name entities which aren’t acronyms – Uber, Boddingtons, Yahoo, Billington’s sugar. In short, hugely famous brands overhauled by a hugely famous agency.

That distinction matters. A Journal of Marketing study found that store-brand products using minimalist packaging don’t benefit from the same quality perceptions as established brands because consumers already associate own-label with lower investment. Material choice, structure and brand positioning all influence whether simplicity is read as confidence or simply as less.

As a vegan of two decades, and a squeamish one at that, the thought alone of a “whole-carcass butcher business” makes me feel rather queasy – so it’s a testament to Studio Blackburn’s incredible skill that despite my personal nonsense, I absolutely adore this branding project. And I love it not in spite of things like the utterly unflinching, raw-flesh-laden art direction, but in part because of it.

Products exist for that very reason. Tube keys, tube wringers and tube squeezers have been around for decades. John Gill patented one of the earliest examples in the late 1970s after noticing how much paint and toothpaste households were throwing away. Nearly fifty years later they’re still being sold across beauty, personal care, pharmaceuticals and food. L’Occitane has its Magic Key. UpCircle sells an aluminium version as a standalone product. ODYSKIN makes one specifically for sunscreen.

Back in February, we covered a project that was so delightful I still think of it often (not least thanks to its utterly ridiculous, ingenuously earwormish jingle): HotDog, with its branding by SMLXL.