The Edit: five new projects including B's Bees by Mean

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.

B’s Bees (an abbreviation of Brian’s Bees) is a London-based artisan producer of 100% raw, handcrafted, single-origin honey. “Their bandit brigade of bees steal wild nectar from the locally protected woodlands of Hawkwood and Petts Wood to produce the finest, sweetest goodness in the whole of the Southern Kingdom,” reveals Mean, the Helsinki and London-based design studio behind the brand’s identity and packaging. Through the intelligent use of repetition and negative space, B’s Bees’ identity successfully mimics the mesmerising interior of a beehive, in which one of the jobs of a beekeeper is to find the queen amongst thousands of workers and drones. Inspired by this, Mean developed a hide-and-seek system for the brand name within a plethora of ‘B’s, all set in the unmissable Druk from Commercial Type. “Druk’s flat-sided, condensed nature allows for very tight typesetting,” Mean’s Creative Director Mat Giles explains, making it “perfect for bold, impactful headlines as well as the signature ‘B’ pattern that wraps around the jar labels.” Encased in G . F Smith’s Colorplan Sorbet Yellow and finished in one-colour letterpress, the packaging evokes both the softer hues of flower pollen and nectar and the rugged authenticity of beekeeping to perfectly capturing the spirit of the brand.

Aiming to disrupt the UK’s ready-to-drink market, VACAY is a new range of canned alco-pops with a ‘sophisticated yet eccentric’ vision. Its packaging design, courtesy of brand agency The Refreshment Club, revolves around a series of characterful illustrations that do something quirky, unexpected and out of the ordinary at every opportunity. With an aesthetic inspired by Japanese illustration, each drawing intelligently incorporates the logotype’s ‘C’ in its centre while performing a seemingly random act, such as the “stiff straight cactus doing the can-can” for the brand’s tequila-infused ‘Paloma’ variety. Launching alongside the line ‘the cocktail for your happy hour’, VACAY wants to be the cocktail for untraditional occasions.

Named and branded by brand and marketing agency Fook, Buddy is a Toronto-based cannabis start-up aiming to float over the stereotypes often associated with the booming industry. Focusing on making the user experience as simple as possible through an accessible product lineup and informative service, Fook set out to demystify some of the complexities and misunderstanding around buying cannabis products. Buddy’s resulting brand identity thrives in trying to be as straightforward as possible, with the name not only being a subtle pun towards the product, but also a literal implication of friendship. Set in Commercial Type’s Graphik, the logotype is the simplest distillation of this theme, using two dots as a genderless, ageless and timeless symbol for companionship. The circular forms act as the basis of a fluid and flexible visual system, varying in size, scale and quantity to metaphorically represent a variety of easy-to-understand, punchy headlines.

Studio Maertens is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary design practice, launched in 2019 by industrial design Maximilian Maertens. They develop lighting, interior design and interior decoration with the intention of creating long-lasting and appreciated products. To devise their visual identity and digital presence, Maertens partnered with design director Bruno Arizio, creative developer Luis Henrique Bizarro and 3D designer Fernando Berlanda. Aiming to visually express the post-industrial aesthetic of Maerten’s work, the team developed an elegant, sparse and subtly-playful typographic approach that alludes a deep atmosphere.

Based in Los Angeles and New York, Cannibal is a content and media company that aims to disrupt cultural narratives through a data-driven creative approach. Their identity, designed by New York studio M M NT, reflects the consumptive, indulgent attitude of society through a carefully-edited grotesk logotype. Used as a masthead across all applications as a homage to magazine design, in which Cannibal first started, the logotype acts as the centrepiece of the bold, simple and elegant visual identity system. The palette never strays from black-and-white, as “black lends itself well for media given its dramatic nature,” M M NT’s Joshua Lepley tells us, before admitting that also, “it’s just so damn classic.”