The Edit: five new projects including BST Architects by BETTY + BETTY

Each and every day, we're lucky to discover dozens of interesting and inspiring projects from around the world. From global identities and campaigns to side projects and independently published books, The Edit is home to five of them; every two weeks.

BST Architects create spaces across a wide variety of industries, ranging from commerce and education to culture and leisure. They work in both 2D and 3D environments; and always incorporate multiple perspectives, including their own, their clients and the end-users. Inspired by their approach, Düsseldorf-based studio BETTY + BETTY created an identity system for the practice that revolves around an isometric framework. The three letters of BST fluidly move around stationery, books and digital surfaces, taking on several different perspectives with a dotted grid as a base. The angled letterforms are derived from Milieu Grotesque’s Maison Neue, a contemporary sans serif with warm, harmonious curves. In contrast, the supporting typography is set in Maison Neue’s monospace counterpart, providing a distinctly architectural edge.

Jim Lahey, the creator of the ‘No-Knead Bread’ recipe popularised by The New York Times, founded his Sullivan Street Bakery back in 1994. Since then, it’s expanded to multiple locations throughout New York and Miami and opened a thriving wholesale business. Commissioned to rebrand the bakery, independent designer Phillip Nessen found inspiration in New York’s unintentionally-beautiful industrial signage and metalwork, after being told by Lahey to “make something elevated but unpretentious”. The pattern that lives at the heart of the identity is designed to represent wheat, while subtly borrowing the structure of subway grates, window guards and folding elevator doors. The olive green colour is a sophisticated evolution of the bakery’s previous green-brown colour, minus some of the muddy brown. Typographically, Nessen referenced the New York of multiple decades past. Through the choice of News Gothic and Helvetica, he was able to draw a connection between the bakery and old community spots such as doughnut shops, red sauce Italian joints and diners.

Grower is a small-scale eco-cosmetics company from Saint Petersberg, Russia. All of their products are made from hemp oil and a multitude of natural ingredients. In creating their packaging, local studio Munk Design was faced with the challenge of making labels affordable for printing in micro-batches. With such a small production scale, he decided to use small sheet sizes and silkscreen printing techniques to make the labels accessible and available on demand. By stripping away any excess, Munk’s visual solution aims to champion Grower’s eco-friendly and straightforward values. The selection of Nikolas Type’s Cosi Times on the packaging, with its curvy and organic forms, creates a mood that feels challenging yet familiar for a hemp-based product.

With the Île-de-France landscape due to commence enormous railway construction and transformation of public space, Île-de-France Mobilités and the Société du Grand Paris needed a way to physically and practically represent the principles of the development. Led by architecture studio TVK, a team was commissioned to do so, with Paris-based studio Travaux-Pratiques taking the design of a publication collating the prior three years of work. Essentially acting as a robust, practical manual – hence the recycled plastic overlay and Coptic stitching — the book promotes and presents the design decisions of the development in a welcoming form. Alongside their editorial design, Travaux-Pratiques also commissioned photography and illustration. Accessible to anyone, the book can be read here.

Working with Namu Park, Brooklyn-based Studio HMVD has created an adaptable brand identity for a new slow fashion brand, The Sloth. Aiming to reimagine the sustainable fashion market, The Sloth is a platform for users to buy, sell, style and save their used clothing. Acknowledging the hobby and pleasure in purchasing clothes, The Sloth aims to simplify and slow consumption through upcycling fashion rather than stop it altogether, in order to extend the garment’s lifecycle. HMVD’s friendly identity revels in contrasts, with an expressive serif opposed to a refined sans serif and natural textures contrary to the structured lines of the grid – alluding to the collision between the realms of slow and high fashion. Referencing the animal in its name, The Sloth’s wordmark is fluid, with numerous lazy and relaxed logo lockups, paired with a set of brand icons inspired by vintage clothing patterns.