The Edit: five new projects including G2K by CRU

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.

Based in Germany, Egypt and Mexico, G2K is a technology and data company operating in the field of hazard detection. Through their innovative AI-powered software platform, Parsifal, they are able to control aggressive fans in sports stadiums, maintain safety in factories, and detect imminent danger everywhere from doctors offices to major transportation hubs. Aiming to create a bold identity for G2K representative of their cutting-edge technological developments, Berlin-based brand consultancy CRU found inspiration in the work of Wim Crouwel and The Designers Republic, as well as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. At the core of the resulting identity is Good2Type, a brutalist custom typeface that, as told by CRU co-founder Jan Erlinghagen, is “most unusual in this field of industry and transports the boldness of the whole company.” With the typeface leading the way alongside a futuristic collection of dots and glyphs, the brand finds itself applied in a striking combination of black, white and red, which Erlinghagen explains was created to “stand out from G2K’s competitors which mostly use blue and greenish palettes.”

Located in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital city, ROCKIT is a co-working space created specifically for the country’s leading financial technology companies and sustainability innovators. Delving into ROCKIT’s role as a vibrant ecosystem for networking, expertise and cooperation, locally-based Andstudio designed their identity to portray an active, dynamic and trustworthy community. Thanks to its sharp geometric forms, the resulting visual language is systematic and robotic, yet illustrates a human edge with its warm serif typography and daring colour combinations. The undoubted stars of the identity are the dynamic background patterns, which traverse every application, stretching and moulding to fill every format and layout expressively.

Terrassa Noves Tendències, or TNT for short, is a festival dedicated to the support of new artistic formats that takes place in Terrassa, a small city to the north of Barcelona. Commissioned to create the festival’s visual identity, nearby design studio Bakoom introduced two flexible layers of typography – one a bold and straightforward sans serif core, and the other a challenging, jagged script. The two interact and merge “like a game of chance,” Bakoom explains, resulting in an identity system that’s as genre-bending, unexpected and open to new ideas as the festival itself.

Peakon is an ‘employee success platform’ that allows companies to improve their workplace by converting employee feedback into engaging insights, personalised training and suggested actions. Their identity, designed by Copenhagen-based brand agency Kontrapunkt, is based around three brand drivers – trustworthy, encouraging and humane – through a fluid suite of colours, illustrations, icons and imagery. At the heart of the graphic language is a striking combination of typography, with the unusually-broad forms of Grilli Type’s GT Alpina serving as Peakon’s display typeface. In contrast, the appropriately functional DM Sans serves as its support. Illustrations, created in-house by Peakon themselves, embrace a tactile, ‘less is more’ aesthetic through thick, colourful brush strokes, adding a vibrant, characterful touch to the otherwise understated identity system.

Since the mid-90s, The Communications Store has developed a reputation as one of the world’s leading PR companies, having partnered with the likes of Missoni, Pinterest, Versace and Warner Bros. After rapidly growing in size and expanding their services in recent times, as well as focusing more on sustainability and inclusivity, they sought the expertise of London-based studio POST to redesign their visual identity and corporate communications. Through abstract dot patterns, the result conveys how different forms of communication and good ideas can be spread around the world. Each dot portrays a new message or concept, coming together to produce beautifully-textured streams that adapt in movement and scale to their environment. “The movement is inspired by nature,” POST explains, “like particles blowing in the wind, droplets creating ripples in waters, flying like a murmuration of birds – all working collectively for a common cause.” Combined with elegant typography, the dot textures find themselves gracing tactile paper stocks, in a combination of gold and deep earthy green, to represent the balance found in the natural world.