Hugmun’s colour-drenched identity for skincare brand Oio Lab taps into its potent ingredients

As a skincare brand, Oio Lab believes in harnessing the vast treasure troves of nature. Its products are crafted with the choicest natural ingredients – cold-pressed oils and plant extracts of the highest quality, obtained using innovative methods. When creating an identity for the brand, Copenhagen-based design studio Hugmun focused on its ingredients and oils as a conceptual jumping-off point – designing a suite of colourful gradients and ‘blobs’ that represent the oily texture of the products.

“We delved into a deep research about the ingredients, to find out exactly what is inside each product. The different colours used are a reflection of each of the elements and ingredients,” shares Co-founder & Designer Tomasz Pawluk. “This also provided an architecture to give each product its own mini identity within the brand to represent the changing ingredients.” This vibrant, chromatic output runs throughout the brand – it’s seen in the packaging and the visual assets that accompany the photography, which features hi-def shots of the ingredients, each rich in colour.

Hugmun worked with the existing wordmark, but updated the identity’s typographic palette with the use of Optima nova LT Pro as the supporting typeface, a functional sans serif that adds contrast to the handwritten feel of the wordmark. “The choice of Optima nova may seem old-fashioned to some, but this typeface allowed us to use the Polish language in a very pleasant way, which is nicely compatible with this font, and that was our main guideline,” Co-founder & Designer Maria Milenko tells us. It also helped add structure to long chunks of text, such as the description of the product and the ingredients in the packaging.

The colours of the brand, however, are the headlining act of the identity, if you will. It’s what one first notices about the brand, and the visual element that has the most lasting impact. The rigour and technicality that’s usually associated with a science-backed brand such as Oio is softened by Hugmun’s take on the graphic blobs – blue brush strokes are used on the packaging or their face serum, which is a translucent liquid powder blue sheen, while the glittery orange gel lotion fusion comes in a box featuring imperfect, misshapen concentric circles, as if taken from a child’s sketchbook.

Hugmun

Oio Lab