Opened late last year, Standard Equipment is a Toronto based product/furniture company that produces simplistic decor for your home. Primarily fabricated from steel, SE has a wide range of bold products like sofas, incense holders, and ceramic mugs, which have this beautiful steel ring around them, it’s such a cool detail. Everything they create has a timeless feeling to it, there’s nothing trendy or fad-ish about them. Just a great series of iconic pieces that should last the test of time.
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This series of objects by Yuri Mo, which have been 3D rendered in a kind of “hyperpop” aesthetic, for lack of a better term, immediately caught my eye. I love how fantastical these are, somewhere between the throwback “transparent everything” trend and if Karan Singh did more acid trip inspired work in 3D. And the complexity of each of the surfaces and how the colors change really blows my mind, this is such beautiful work.
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My love for food-related branding is unending, and when I spotted this work from Humid Daze, I was immediately a fan. Humid Daze is a one-man design studio helmed by Sean Jones, a designer and illustrator based in Atlanta. The work he did for Deeply, a cafe and bottle shop in Florida, is clean and timeless, using elements of sans serif type paired with hand drawn elements. It’s all so crisp and clean that you can’t go wrong, and in the end, it allows the coffee to shine through clearest. I feel like everyone could use a little spot like this in their neighborhood.
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The folks at Studio MPLS are always up to something cool, creating some of the most striking branding and packaging designs out there. For example, their work for River St. Joe is one of my favorite projects, ever. Most recently, they released new work for Sola Coffee Co, a coffee shop opening soon in the northern part of Minnesota.
The system they built for the brand seems pretty flexible, utilizing either three or four typefaces (and some varying weights) and a seven color palette, which they’re able to bend in a number of directions. I’m such a fan of a type-based design systems, and I think they’ve made a lot of smart choices with the contrast between each. Just enough personality and quirk to be ownable without feeling whacky (in a bad way, whacky can be great). Most importantly, in my opinion, is it’s sense of timelessness. I write about this a lot and I do think it’s a good marker of strong design, especially in regards to product packaging and identity.