Current State by Werner Design Werks
This week, the Current State of beauty by Werner Design Werks, plus the best historical logos added to LogoArchive.
Current State
Opinion by Emily Gosling
Current State is a skincare line launched by sisters Emily and Lanie Parr a couple of years back, which aims to “disrupt the status quo”, according to Werner Design Werks which created its boldly multicoloured branding.
There’s a lot to love about this packaging and brand design – not least, that expansive approach to colour. It seems that Werner Design Werks took this tack as a response to the brand’s central ethos of “no set skincare regimen – give your skin what it needs when it needs it. No typecasting – products are defined by skin type because your skin is not always the same.”
As such, the Minnesota-based studio opted to use “not one muted brand colour,” but “an explosion of 30+ colours based on product features.” Werner Design Werks continues, “Bold colour creates shelf-impact and encourages you to mix and match based on your skin’s needs.”
And this is where one of my few criticisms of this project comes in: if the colours are based on product features, how does that work? What are we looking for? How can consumers browsing shelves easily recognise or find what they’re looking for? In purely decorative terms, or as a strong visual identity system, the multifarious hues work brilliantly – but it’s unclear how they fit into any sort of information or product hierarchy.
However, where so many beauty brands opt for pared back to the point of being medicinal – especially in the post-The Ordinary era of identity design for makeup and skincare – it’s great to see something that veers in the other direction, yet still looks slick and trustworthy. In recent times there’s been a raft of beauty brands that take minimalism beyond sophisticated and into the territory of just plain boring, so you have to applaud WDW for very blatantly eschewing all that in its work for Current State.
The branding is playful, but not daft; different, but still sits comfortably within its category – a quality that should not be underestimated for brands like this, stocked mostly in huge-name stores (in this case, Walmart).
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Alpine joy
Opinion by Emily Gosling
If you’re reading BP&O, you’re more likely than most to be the type who knows their counters from their stems; their terminals from their tittles, and so on. In short, a TypeNerd – categorically one of the best kinds of nerd.
And what do nerds like? Hyper specific ‘injokes’ that aren’t exactly striving to be funny, perhaps you might call them Easter eggs (there’s probably a very long German word for this) — those sorts of details that few might notice, but which those who do – in this case, the fairly font-fanatical – truly appreciate. The inclusion of one of those is among the many reasons this project – the recent rebrand of Post Post Hotel by Studio Bruch – is so superb.
Post Post Hotel has stood proudly in the spa town of Bad Hofgastein in Salzburg, Austria, for more than 600 years – since 1421, to be precise. Until the hotel’s rebrand, it was known as Alte-Post, which translates as Old Post; both names are a reference to the building’s historical use as a post office.
As a four star hotel in the ski resort of the Gastein Valley, the new branding had to marry more high-end cues and traditional elements with modernity. Studio Bruch, which is based in Graz, Austria, has pulled off that tricky balancing act absolutely beautifully, through a stripped back but bright and highly distinctive colour palette, some lovely simple linework illustration and the hands-down, standout highlight of the whole thing – the absolutely gorgeous bespoke brand font, BR-Post.
Created by Studio Bruch’s very own Kurt Glänzer, this striking serif font is where that aforementioned Easter-egg-type situation comes in: not only are its strange quirks and deliciously odd little nuances lovely to look at, they also serve to tie the typography firmly to the idea of the post office that underpins the entire identity concept.
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