Happy Ending is a new casual cocktail and natural wine bar, from the people behind Nektar. It resides in an old massage studio in the heart of Oslo. The website has a built-in day/night colour mode, that automatically changes when night comes. The identity tries to bind the cheeky word play all together, balancing between the humorous and something a bit more kinky. Designed by Smuss Studio, and photos by Simen Øvergaaard.

Earth Alliance is a worldwide although US-centric organization at the meeting point between ecological fight and the creative industry. Earth Alliance was co-founded by actor Leonardo Di Caprio (with Laurene Powell Jobs and Brian Sheth) in 2019 and heavily advertised as such at first, but we noticed the disappearance of his name from their main channels headers, maybe due to the recurring questions around the actor's ethics and way of life (partners systematically under the age of 25…).

Delicious Nuggets are the first main public content released by Earth Alliance, in the shape of a website featuring articles targeted to creators interested into using their voices to raise awareness around climate change, as well as a fund to foster such creators. From the Nuggets website:

Nuggets are bite-sized, science-backed snacks to help creators—like you—change the conversation about the climate crisis.

Earth Alliance features a festival of typefaces for their “Nuggets”, with visual cues inspired by (online) magazine design. The three main families are Kilotype's Queens, NaN Tragedy, and Colophon’s Basis Grotesque. Each nugget, treated as an independent article, can feature a range of additional titling fonts, although some of them (Review, Ohno Softie) are used across different nuggets. The font license budget of this project might have been juicy.

From Hardie Grant:

Tim Anderson shows you how you can build your own delicious bowl from scratch as well as how you can construct your very own bento (Japan's beloved and beautiful lunch boxes) from the comfort of your own home. Fun to make (and eat) JapanEasy: Bowls & Bento celebrates the versatility, simplicity and joy of Japanese food. This is everyday self-care and self-love, in bowl and bento form.

Alias Harbour and GT Maru Mega are used for headline type, with GT Maru for secondary type. Japanese text is set in Hiragino Kaku Gothic. See also JapanEasy and Vegan JapanEasy, from the same series.

Café Bravo is a café and wine bar created by Bravo Musique, a music label from Montreal.

Their visual identity was designed by Demande Spéciale, using a customised version of Herbus Bold – see for example the shortened E, and the more conventional shapes of S and D. Herbus is paired with Suisse Int’l. On one of their retail products, an outline version of GT Maru Mega makes a guest appearance.

The sixth RUFA annual report, designed by Intorno Design (Guido Lombardo, Roberta De Cristofaro, Fabrizio Crollari), presents the two-year period 2020–2021 as a single temporal unit, the time of COVID-19, the narrative of a year made up of 24 months and 320 pages, the most voluminous academic report to date. The graphic, photographic, and illustrative choices respond to the horror vacui generated by the pandemic and recall the artifices, physical or digital filters, that society has chosen to adopt as tools to stem the contagion. The variety and saturation of the chromatic tones serve as a sort of artistic compensation: having lost the warmth (human, relational, vital), we return it and compensate it in the form of color.

The choice of GT Maru by Grilli Type, which incorporates many emoji within the stylistic set, the type composition and layout refer directly to the modes and practices of digital devices, to which we have been and still are overexposed every day.

The photographic project on the first pages presents portraits of people with leading roles within the Academy who interact symbolically and playfully with a physical Plexigas filter often used in academic premises.

The illustration project introducing each course of study, on the other hand, pays tribute to the great international personalities who passed away over these two years, leaving a great legacy through their work to the students and creatives of today.

The photo project presenting the RUFA staff also evokes attitudes and moments of life that we all experienced during the pandemic period, ironically mocking the collaboration of the academic team.

A Japanese cuisine based in Kuwait City, inspired by a dark kitchen concept, Koto is created as a bold and playful restaurant where customers are served a delivery-only experience. For the brand to be appealing, the visual identity had to be developed with an engaging timeless narrative.

Typography is the key foundation for Koto’s identity. The logo – set in GT Maru Mega – is rooted and grounded in urban Japanese aesthetics, and recalls the Japanese pop culture concept kawaii. The secondary Information is typeset in the narrow, rounded Miso; the Japanese texts use PingFang.

Likewise, following the brand’s personality, the logo required an uplifting logomark as well. Ms. Koto is designed after two iconic Japanese pop culture characters in the early 80s. Mariya Takeuchi’s emblematic smiling-album cover encourages a sudden familiar warmth while the happy pink cheeks give a nudge to the anime character Heidi; these attributes tighten the logomark’s brand construction.

One of the biggest challenges nowadays in packaging design is to reduce the waste that it generates. Care packaging is part of the brand’s values; we created a modular system layout for labeling the biodegradable containers and bags to produce a flexible and eco-friendly brand.

Koto is a love letter dedicated to Japan.
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