Gabrielle Adam’s celestial dental care range will leave your teeth feeling as “stellar as stardust”

Copenhagen-based freelance designer Gabrielle Adam presents a conceptual project for an oral care brand, ‘Premolar Grains,’ inspired by interstellar presolar grains and their strength, longevity, and beauty. “These grains have been around for billions of years and existed before the sun was formed,” she explains. “They were spewed out by ageing stars, and they then got mixed with chondrules, calcium-aluminium inclusions and dust particles.”

Inspired by their legacy, the designer conjured the idea of an oral care brand, and built a visual world to match. For the wordmark, Adam used KK Topo by Kaam Kaaj, a typeface that beautifully bridges the gap between geometric precision and warm approachability, mirroring not only the brand’s fascination with stardust and the strength of meteorites, but also the aesthetics of dental care. “In traditional toothpaste ads we’d see on TV, they’d always manage to squeeze out the paste onto the toothbrush bristles in this perfect kind of ‘S’ shape. Those are the smooth angles I see in KK Topo, and I love those details,” she tells us.

When it came to selecting secondary typefaces, Adam found harmony in Denim INK by Displaay and ABC Favorit and ABC Favorit Mono by Dinamo. Denim INK was used for titles and headlines, drawing the eye with its mixture of curved and sharp angles. “[It] is an interesting typeface featuring some curved angles, yet its other angles are set at a sharp 90º,” she notes, reflecting on the choice. “It felt like a nice middle ground between KK Topo and a completely angular sans serif, as it retained some of the logotype’s charm but felt a bit more serious too.” Meanwhile, ABC Favorit was used for body copy and ABC Favorit Mono for annotations and CTAs, both adding a touch of seriousness to balance with the playful KK Topo.

To avoid overcomplicating the brand’s central mark, Adam took a simple approach and chose a star – a motif that is recognisable and quickly communicates the core concept of Premolar Grains. The art direction further builds on the central theme by incorporating cold tones, metallic textures, and sterile, tiled environments, subtly conjuring the ‘feeling’ of the interiors of spaceships, and the bitterly cold temperatures of space. 

Likewise, the colour palette – consisting of blue, green, and a creamy white – combines the freshness of a dental hygiene product with the brand’s backstory and thematic elements of science and space. The black and darker tones of blue and green represent the depth of space and the colour of meteorites. “The only warm colour used was the creamy white, as this spoke to the spotless labs used to develop the products, as well as peoples’ pearly whites,” Adam says. “It created a nice balance too compared to the other, colder colours.”

Gabrielle Adam