With devices designed to support focus, health, and intentional living, Daylight is reshaping our relationship with technology from exhausting and addictive to energizing and magical. Working with the founding team, we created a design system that strikes a harmonious balance between futurism and nostalgia, digital and analog, the human world and the natural one.

With the rise of ‘dumbphones’ and an array of health-focused devices, people are seeking innovation that brings things back to a healthier, more analog, and more offline lifestyle. Daylight is emerging into this moment with a computing ecosystem built around low-stimulation, blue-light-free screens and a distraction-free OS.

The brand concept is inspired by the path of the sun (solis iter), which is responsible for innumerable biological processes including circadian rhythm (which isn’t disrupted by the DC-1’s amber backlit display). This subtly connects Daylight to the natural world without making the brand feel overtly earthy or hippie. Layouts and key design elements mimic the sun’s path, from headlines set in a diagonal path, to drop shadows that mimic those cast by the sun. Animations are calm and meditative, moving in an east-to-west direction.

A varied typographic palette adds texture and recognition to the visual identity of an already distinct product. ABC Arizona Mix brings the sophistication of a serif without feeling overtly bookish. Dinamo’s ABC Rom harkens back to the past age of tech (before current negative tech stuff like doomscrolling). The wordmark is set in ES Build by Extraset, which feels simultaneously modern (e.g. Dyson) and 1970s nostalgia (e.g. Playmobil).

For their fifteenth full-length release, The Avett Brothers came to us to design a layered visual experience that embodies the deeply personal and calmly existential collection of songs that make up their eponymous album. The design articulates a pattern language that frames the band’s exploration of spirituality, intimacy, and rootedness. We turned to the complex, contemplative diagrams and charts of ancient gnosticism and hermeticism for initial inspiration. From there, we expanded our range of influences to poetry, and the band’s own deeply place-based (and significantly rural Southern) lineages.

This led to a rich, detail-oriented typographic palette that references literature, mystical diagrams, and vintage religious texts to create a textural atmosphere that is at once storied and contemporary.

Garamond Premier, Adobe’s version of the serif all-star, carries the suite’s body copy and titles, setting a sophisticated, literary tone that avoids coming across as stuffy or antiquated. Out of the Dark’s Syncro Italic, Rokha (W Type Foundry) and Dédale (205TF) are used as complementary fonts from the LP jacket interior diagram to the lyric “poetry” chapbook for their strong character and classical references.

A flexible website supports the album release, combining the contemplative, bookish atmosphere of band’s off-road lives with the invigorating energy of their live performances. Its typography takes a more modern, evergreen approach, with SwissPosters by newglyph and The Future (Klim Type Foundry) contrasting Garamond Première.

[More info on Discogs]

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is a critical, emergent field of science, but it’s also rife with unanswered questions and overpromises. Isometric, a UK-based startup, set out to (re)establish trust in carbon credits through a science-led, interdisciplinary approach to carbon markets and verification. They needed a brand as rigorous and meticulous as their work, but that set them apart as a trustworthy, expert, and visionary new leader in the climate tech space.

Dinamo’s ABC Repro is the only font family in use; its unique and diverse styles and weights ensure consistency across every aspect of design, further emphasizing Isometric’s scientific rigor visually. The use of Repro’s “space S” alternate infuses a subtle playfulness that also nods to the company’s position at the vanguard of CDR and its role in helping shape the future of the field.

The typography ensures consistency across every aspect of design, further emphasizing Isometric’s scientific rigor visually. A “space S” infuses a subtle playfulness and oblique reference to the company’s position at the vanguard of CDR and its role in helping shape the future of the field.

From The Office of Ordinary Things:

Named after an iconic Wendell Berry poem, Mad Agriculture is at the forefront of the regenerative agriculture revolution. We created a visual ecosystem that’s as “alive, messy, and mutable” as the work they do (and the poets they read).

The Mad Agriculture brand channels the gritty, hands-on attitude shared by counterculturalists and farmers alike—where things are slightly off kilter and the unexpected is embraced.

The Office of Ordinary Things selected an amalgam of typefaces rooted in history and tradition to represent that Mad Agriculture within its agricultural and countercultural contexts. Editorial New channels the organic and delicate qualities of environmental and back-to-the-earth movements, while Antique No. 6 invokes a rural, “wild west” but sensible tone; ITC Franklin Gothic makes a loud, emphatic statement harkening punk sensibilities and protest movements. Through this, we create a “biodiverse” typographic ecosystem as alive and dynamic as the prairie strips central to the brand’s concepts and to regenerative agriculture’s success.

The design system for Simply Organic’s high-end spice line, Single Origin, draws inspiration from vintage apothecary labels. Simply Organic’s main brand recedes in the background and allows each spice’s distinct qualities to take center stage: the geographic origin, cultivation methods, and distinct potent flavor qualities.

To accomplish this, both the standard and condensed widths of Gza employed for their vintage-inspired qualities. Additionally, the monospaced cut of Founders Grotesk is utilized for its typewriter aesthetic. The declaration of weight is added in Tungsten Compressed.

Fom The Office of Ordinary Things:

An international group of 39 climate scientists created the CDR Primer, a comprehensive survey that brings together the technological, scientific, and sociological tenets of carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Though technology alone cannot completely mitigate the catastrophic effects of the climate crisis, CDR will play a critical role in addressing the problem. The CDR Primer serves as humanity’s playbook for the next 100 years of carbon removal and beyond.

CDR Primer exists as a printed book and website (essentially an ebook), ensuring as wide an audience reach as possible. In order to maximize comprehension and accessibility for the CDR Primer, a single type family was used: Suisse Int’l. A highly legible and meticulously cut font, Suisse provides the necessary versatility and elegance to support long, dense text, scientific formulas, infographics, all while still looking great at large point sizes. While the primer seeks to elevate scientific research through sophisticated, rigorous design, it was essential to avoid weighing the content down with an unnecessary preoccupation with aesthetics. Suisse maintains the caliber and function, while also not over-asserting itself visually. Body text uses its alternate lowercase l (with a tail).

Words from The Office of Ordinary Things:

A family-owned and -operated print shop, D&K tasked us with creating a piece that showcases the scope, quality, and ambition of their craft, while also educating their customers about sustainable printing basics. They gave us free rein to design a print promo that exemplifies this in both form and content.

The promo comes alive in the ways it asks readers to participate and engage through sliding, tearing, flipping, ripping, unpacking. Zip strip letters spelling the client’s initials demonstrate the delight that can occur when print is combined with playful design.

We put Söhne through its paces, using it a range of point sizes (the bookmark sheet features teeny tiny 3pt type!) and printing on a variety of substrates. Söhne held up beautifully on press in all scenarios. We utilized the middle to lighter weights of Söhne, including Halbfett, Kräftig, and Buch, with a touch of the Leicht weight of the condensed cut, Söhne Schmal.

Situating locality and intimacy at the core of their ethos, Guildford Green is a wine merchant that provides a lovingly curated, seasonally rotating selection of wines from small, independent wineries for their community of customers. We crafted a brand that evokes both their playfulness and sophistication, the distinct duality of an excellent bottle of wine.

Canela is a graceful display typeface that embraces contradictions. Its forms are in a space between sans and serif, both soft and sharp, modern yet classical. Guildford Green, like Canela, is a modern take on a craft with a rich history. Canela Text has less contrast between thick and thin strokes and looser spacing, making it ideal for use in long-form content. Founders Grotesk Mono, a reference to the typewriter era, is used to evoke a sense of functional romanticism.

The Guildford Green logotype is based on Nikolai, a bold serif with crisp lines and high legibility. The lowercase g’s curvy, flowing link and loop is a customized character that draws inspiration from Voyage.

In a field rife with overwhelmingly complex data and lofty solutions, CarbonPlan creates tools and resources to “improve the transparency and scientific integrity of climate solutions.” We developed a brand optimized for data visualization and comprehension with a touch of cheeky geek.

The brand employs the use of Colophon’s Relative, a typeface family split into two halves. The proportional Relative and the fixed-width Relative Mono, plus their lovechild – a “faux” monospace. The CarbonPlan brand employs all of these versions to create a rich typographic hierarchy. Relative Mono is used for labels and infographics, the proportional family is used for body copy and headlines, and the faux is used for captions and other brief patches of text.

The spacing of Relative is “relatively” (sorry) loose, perfect for body copy. When set at large point sizes, negative values are used for tracking/letter spacing. On the contrary, the faux mono’s spacing is fairly tight, requiring positive tracking in this identity.

Words from The Office of Ordinary Things:

Struggling to communicate the climate-fighting technology behind their cleaning products, CleanO2 needed a ground-up rebrand to more effectively tell their story. We utilized a radically straightforward strategy, centering the brand around the company’s innovative products: soap made with carbon captured by CleanO2.

The typographic focal point of the brand is Bagoss by Displaay Type Foundry, which arguably has the nicest looking question mark of all time. (The CleanO2 brand was developed while Bagoss was still in beta, so some details may differ from the final retail release). Bagoss had the perfect amount of friendliness imparted by its subtle stroke contrast and angular terminals. Body and supportive text is set in GT America, with Tungsten making a tiny cameo for the product weight.

Inspired by the hand-painted process and sun-kissed results of their eco-friendly hair coloring technique, we created a brand identity for Sweep Balayage Bar that captures the salon’s chic yet playful attitude.

Balayage is a hair coloring technique invented in France and popularized in the 1970s. Balayage’s unique hand-painted process results in randomly placed swipes of color that have a more natural, “sun-kissed” appearance. This inherent quality gave way to the brand’s signature 70s-inspired sunrise motif which is integrated throughout the brand in the form of borders, badges, and illustrations.

The painting motif was extended to the brand illustrations and building signage. Instead of using conventional vinyl window graphics, we commissioned a local sign painter to hand paint the designs, resulting in a perfectly imperfect handmade aesthetic that mirrors the balayage process.

The brand’s primary typeface, Columbia Sans Display, has distinctive italics that harken back to 1970s-era heavy-bottom fonts (like Charade and Benguiat Charisma) and blend seamlessly with the brand’s retro-modern aesthetic. Body copy is set in Domaine Text, and Vulf Mono is used to round out the typographic hierarchy and add a touch of playfulness.

Aris is a creative production and post-production studio specializing in advertising, film, and branded content. The identity makes use of Px Grotesk for headline and Atlas Grotesk for body copy. In this context, Atlas Grotesk serves as a pared-down companion to Px Grotesk. The workmark uses a customized version of the now-retired Headline style of Fugue.

Film production tools have a distinctive visual language with which Aris’ clients are very familiar. References to this language are implemented in unique, understated ways like the visible composition grid and the use of a monospaced font (Atlas Typewriter) placed along the outer edges of a composition. Because the references aren’t embedded into the logo, they can be pared back (e.g. business card) or made more overt (e.g. T-shirt) to suit the context.

For over a decade, and almost in secret, Scott Avett has amassed an impressive body of artwork. Though known primarily as a member of The Avett Brothers, Scott’s formal training was in visual art. We designed and co-edited a monograph that catalogs his work and documents his creative process.

The typographic palette was carefully chosen to balance a host of tonal qualities and specific use cases. GT Super Display, a striking contemporary serif from Grilli Type, provides the lion’s share of typographic personality. Its sibling, GT Super Text, imparts an appropriate formal quality to the essays. With its simple, rounded, typewriter-esque forms, Optimo’s Hermes Condensed provides a stark counterpoint to GT Super’s razor sharp serifs. Dia, a blocky, quirky sans from Schick Toikka, is peppered throughout the book in titles and headings. Dia’s lighter weight is paired with GT Super Text in interviews to provide a visual tone-of-voice change from interviewer to respondent.

In a field often associated with austerity, order, and rationality, a name like Flower is unexpectedly playful—a welcome respite from the status quo. We were tasked with creating a brand and website inspired by the warmth, optimism, and resourcefulness of mid-century modern architecture with the hope of bringing delight in unexpected places.

The primary wordmark is set in Interstate Bold with a modified O based on the shape of breeze blocks. The supportive typography, a range of Interstate widths and weights, helps ground the identity with a sense of rationality and utility.

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.

We worked with folk rock icons The Avett Brothers on an ambitious design for their latest studio album, Closer Than Together. Our approach eschews typical genre conventions with a playful, interactive, and unexpected experience rooted in the concept of duality. The typography reinforces this concept through the pairing of a heavy sans serif (Dia) with a svelte serif (Ogg Display). A reverse-stress slab serif (Maelstrom) was used as a display face to impart a vintage yet contemporary western vibe.

When the eco pioneers at outdoor apparel brand Patagonia approached us to design a printed guide to Boulder, Colorado, we knew we had an opportunity to push the sustainability envelope. The end result is an amusing yet handy pocket guide that’s also the world’s first use of algae-based offset ink.

Unsure of how the ink would perform on press when designing the piece (it ended up printing perfectly), we chose typefaces that would be forgiving under unforgiving conditions. Hermes Condensed is used for body with Whyte Inktrap for headings and titles (and a tiny bit of Stratos sprinkled in for diagram labels).

Read more about the design and algae ink at Cast Iron Design.

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.

The Spicy Radish is a family-owned meal delivery service that provides fully-prepared meals to busy people, helping save time with healthy dishes that don’t sacrifice quality or tastiness. The Spicy Radish refreshed their brand aiming to add some spice and sophistication to their look, while helping to clarify their messaging.

The brand identity utilizes GZA for headlines, Noe Text for body copy and GT America and GT America Mono for wordmarks and supportive type.

Before starting a brewery, father and son duo Dan and Eric Garfinkel ran a successful business selling classic toys. We helped them bring their fun, straightforward, laid back attitude to their newest venture: Finkle & Garf, a craft brewery in the heart of beer country. GT Walsheim was used to convey the playful nature of the company.

Vehicle wrap design by Eli Bates

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