Diggin’ it
This week, Saint-Urbain designs Dig dog-care brand for "pet parents", and Sometimes Always' striking new look for Fouta Harissa.
Digs for Dogs
Opinion by Emily Gosling
Just when you thought we were approaching a post-pet-parent era, a brand comes along and proves very much otherwise. Thankfully, though, while pet parenting seems to be alive and well; fingers crossed we’ve left behind the whole rather icky “fur baby” days of things like dog nail varnish; or dogs in handbags that really don’t need to be (we make an exception here of course for the hilarious, multifarious, creative ways in which New Yorkers are getting around the rule that dogs on the subway must be carried in bags).
But while we’re hopefully leaving the fur baby thing behind, it’s also worth remembering that VERY long gone are the days of Trad Dog Owner, all wellie boots and whistles and Pedigree Chum and dogs stealing strings of sausages from the high-street butchers’ shop that shuttered up for good back in 1999.
So where are we now? A sort of midpoint really, where our canine companions are definitely humanised, occasionally to the point of borderline-absurdity, but they’re also very much respected for being exactly what they are – dogs.
This is the sort of position that dogcare brand Digs sits squarely within. The entire brand identity was created in partnership with New York-based agency Saint-Urbain (Cerca, Yoshi, Cob, Buena Fé), which says it helped build the brand “from the ground up”, working across naming, brand strategy, voice, and visual identity.
“Digs is a modern dog care platform redefining what pet care can—and should—be. Designed for both pet parents and business owners, the brand sets a higher standard for safety, cleanliness, trust, and emotional connection,” says Saint-Urbain.
The name is drawn from the idea “finding your digs”, the agency continues – an interesting approach, but a smart one. ‘Digs’ sounds quite old-fashioned to me – a term that nowadays, I’d argue you only ever really hear used in relation to student accommodation by parents still grasping at some semblance of being ‘hip’. But it works brilliantly here because of another cliche that may or may not ring true: of all creatures aside from perhaps moles, dogs really, really, love digging holes…
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Feel the Heat
Opinion by Emily Gosling
Most branding has to give some suggestion of what said brand is, or does, or stands for – it’s usually not ideal if they bear little to no resemblance or representation of their category, audience or ideals.
The exceptions are usually things like record covers, or other inherently creative entities like musical instruments, editorial projects; occasionally booze brands, like the perennially fabulous Departed Spirits in its utterly utilitarian petrol-can bottles; or particularly hip beauty brands.
Another exception is fashion – when the branding is done well, that is. And it certainly is done well here, on this identity for Fouta Harissa by Sometimes Always, which describes itself as a graphic design studio “and art direction practice working between São Paulo and Marseille but acting internationally… born in Brazil out of the intersection between graphic design, music and architecture”. The music stuff makes a lot of sense here, for reasons we’ll go into shortly.
Fouta Harissa is a high-quality handmade textile brand founded in Brazil in 2018 by Tunisian duo Lamia Hatira and Alia Mahmoud. Sometimes Always was brought in to work on a new visual identity for Fouta Harissa at the end of last year, working with Brazilian designer and cross-disciplinary creative Renata Sá and Marseille-based Solenn Robic, a multi-disciplinary graphic designer based in Marseille to redesign the logo.
One reason that Fouta Harissa was looking for a branding shake-up was because of its recent changes to how and where its garments are made, moving the production of part of the foutas to Brazil. It was crucial, then, that the brand retained its visual connections to its spiritual home, and the birthplace of its founders – Tunisia.
It’s a superb overhaul – the former branding was fine, but pretty bog standard – out-the-box fonts, a decent colour palette, everything all a bit too ‘nice’ and polite. Now, the brand is so smart that sometimes it looks like a restaurant, at others a record label – and none of that matters…
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