The Edit: five new projects including Bao & Bing by Matinée

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.

Bao & Bing is a Taiwanese street food-inspired restaurant and cocktail bar located in the heart of London’s Marylebone district. Both their menu and interiors pay homage to the bustling night markets of Taipei while reflecting Jiufen’s decadent mountainside teahouses. London-based design agency Matinée, commissioned to develop Bao & Bing’s identity system, gained inspiration from Taipei’s throwaway printed materials such as lottery tickets, price tags and lamppost cards. At the core of the identity is a bubble-tea inspired ampersand which acts as a seal of approval across signage, menus and the restaurant’s very own wheel cakes.

Building on the success of their tonic and soda ranges, Melbourne-based drinks company StrangeLove saw an opportunity to enter the sparkling water market. ‘Another drink by StrangeLove’ is the result, a canned sparkling water with zero sugar, zero calories and all-natural flavours. When designing the packaging, Auckland-based Marx Design looked at the periodic table, noticing a parallel between computer-generated ASCII code and the water’s mineral content and PH levels. As they’d done with other StrangeLove products, the studio employed the strategy of “borrowing from the past to modernise the future”, creating a visual language inspired by 1980’s computer graphics. The result embraces the idea that water is made from many individual properties joined together.

C-LL-CT-V-LY’s c-visuals started as an exploration into how to reach a targeted audience for an existing client. When it turned out to not be right for them, the studio used the idea as the foundation for a low volume, high quality and postable publication. The result is a collection of limited-edition magazines, created in collaboration with a range of creatives such as Peter Grundy, Christoffer Rudquist, Aaron Tilley, Kyle Bean, Felicity McCabe and Mark Porter. Each magazine showcases a selection of unpublished, reordered, remade, refound and newly created artworks. Like much of the industry, C-LL-CT-V-LY were quieter than usual during the lockdown. c-visual’s gave them the opportunity to sort through drawers, rediscover old work, look through saved references and catch-up with previous collaborators. The proposition is simple: they share the costs and profits with all involved, aiming to break even. And then do it again.

Ollie Coleman is a lifestyle photographer based between London and Cape Town, working in both the fashion and luxury travel industries. His visual identity by Kingston School of Art graduate Jessica Coleman is centred around a straightforward yet striking OC monogram, which provides the proportions for a clean and flexible grid system. The identity is considered and minimal, providing an elegant platform for Ollie’s characterful photography.

Jonge Harten is an annual nine-day theatre, performance and dance festival in the Dutch city of Groningen. Having introduced ‘awkwardness’ as the festival’s theme in 2018, Studio HUEY was challenged to rethink and reshape its relevance for 2019. The updated look revolves around dynamic typography, bright colour and a photographic campaign created in collaboration with professional dancers Bilal Bachir and Mayke van Kruchten. A contrast between their body movements and semi-flexible materials enabled the studio to translate the festival’s theme into an eclectic set of imagery intended to spark connections and dialogues.