La Mallorquina, a Barcelona-based home textiles company founded in 1947, initiated a rebranding to strengthen its leadership and connect with a younger audience. The project began with an in-depth review of the catalog, retail touchpoints, and communication dynamics to identify long-built brand assets and update elements that had become outdated.

The new identity balances heritage and contemporaneity: it revisits typographic cues from the brand’s early years. All typography is set in Neutraface. It is paired with Basic, a custom typeface inspired by garment-care icons and based on Neutraface (not shown in the images). ESIETE completed the system with a flexible visual language, designed to be applied consistently across packaging, retail, and campaigns, and to represent the diversity of collections season after season – reinforcing a perception of quality and trend-forward design.

Specimen of Basic, the custom typeface for La Mallorquina

Comptoir is a custom typeface in three weights and a set of pictograms developed by Calame.Bureau for Comptoir des Cotonniers.

In the midst of rethinking its positioning and visual identity, French fashion brand Comptoir des Cotonniers wanted to revamp its logo and have a custom typeface. Continuing on from the previous logo, the typeface draws its inspiration from the canons of Swiss typography, but also from geometric canons such as ITC Avant Garde Gothic. Each font is designed for a specific use and scale, and is accompanied by a set of pictograms. The aim is to create a tool for the brand that is both versatile, universal, and has a strong personality, with original details and impeccable legibility.

WEWEHOME is a brand that proposes essential items for the home, the most intimate and comfortable space in our lives.

The arch-shaped WEWEHOME logo symbolizes the concept of home while reflecting the brand’s value of offering essential items for our living space. The wordmark logo is also designed with soft curves to harmonize with the arch shape.

WEWEHOME’s visual elements consist of typography, a color palette, and pattern graphics. The main typeface, Layfort, conveys a modern yet soft image, while the secondary one, F37 Ginger, was chosen for its simple and contemporary style. The color palette and pattern graphics intuitively represent various activities that take place in the kitchen, laundry, bath, and living room, reinforcing the brand’s identity.

Afficionados of bicycle racing, especially of the Grand Tour, will be well-acquainted with the family name in the headline of this post. Founded by Émile Mercier in 1919, Cycles Mercier became an important manufacturer of racing bikes from 1930 on. The brand pulled up its own cycling team which became world famous in the 1960s and 70s, with athletes like Raymond Poulidor, Cyrille Guimard, and Joop Zoetemelk.

Mercier as a bike manufacturer entered turbulence in the mid 1980s and soon went out of business. But in 2020 the brand Mercier got revived: under the aegis of the founding father’s nephew, Émile Mercier (junior), a new enterprise was established that dedicates itself to the conception and production of high-quality sportswear for cyclists.

The brand design by Yorgo&Co picks up on the formidable history of Mercier and finds clever ways to abridge past and future. At the core are digital revivals of the different logotypes the company used, some of which were original lettering pieces, others just the name set in a certain period typeface. What binds everything together are the three brand colors – rose, white, and purple – that reappear schematically in all products as well as the “Mercier stripe”, and the typeface Proto Grotesk.

Designed by Jean-Baptiste Levée from Production Type, Proto Grotesk was inspired by mid 19th-century sans-serif typefaces, sometimes clunky, sometimes quirky. But it is less of a revival and more of a contemporary proof of concept of how contradictory features can still add up to a harmonious whole and make a strong typeface. Proto Grotesk is used for everything other than the logos, for instance for the website, but also for Mercier’s claim “Bien faire et laisser dire” — which roughly translates to “do your thing and let the others talk”.

The various wordmarks are all based on logotypes used by Mercier in the past.

AL BIES magazine arises from the concern and effort to give visibility to the work of the students of EASD de Moda, the Higher Education in Fashion Design, at San Telmo School of Art in Málaga, Spain. It aims to serve as a platform for sharing what moves and concerns us and what we can contribute from our humble position in the world.

The expression al bies, which means “on bias” or “diagonal” comes from the French term biais, a type of seam cut that is made at 45 degres with respect to the thread. The publication’s name has a lot to do with our way of seeing and feeling fashion. A diagonal line loaded with visual strength and attraction, a line of tension that generates a break in the visual path, directing the eyes and attracting attention.

This publication full of editorial elements has a marked typographic character. The use of Zodiak and JetBrains Mono gives it personality, which together with the layout and composition make AL BIES an attractive publication for the public interested in studying at this school.