Lego for adults: unpacking newkid’s typographic identity for Quagga’s minimalist platform beds

Quagga’s minimalist platform beds promise to change your relationship with your furniture. Putting together one of their beds feels like a bit of a revolution – stripping away the anxiety-riddled panic of furniture assembly, and replacing it with a process that feels more like playing with Lego for adults. Tasked with highlighting the sense of playfulness that’s inherent to the brand, Torontonian branding studio newkid designed a bold and spirited identity for Quagga, leading with a typographical approach chockablock with character.

“As we explored the brand and the typography, we quickly realised that a ‘standard’ typeface wasn’t going to cut it. In the spirit of the brand, something quirky and playful was required,” shares Co-founder & Design Director Rich Brown. The studio found the perfect answer to the problem in Ozik by Nuform Type. “The letter forms (particularly the lowercase) are not only wonderfully weird, but the squared, angular edges feel reminiscent of the wooden components that the Quagga beds are built from,” adds Brown. In an apt nod to how the wooden blocks of the bed can be fitted together, the team imagined each letter as a singular component that could be animated to “slot” together, forming the completed wordmark. The final piece of the puzzle was a pair of secondary typefaces – Gustavo Bold by Lift Type and Frost Type’s Blank Mono – that combined boldness, with an inviting and playful tone.

Fun is the name of the game at Quagga, and newkid drives the point home by leaning into elements that feel warm and accessible. One of the key elements of the brand system is a series of diagrammatic breakdowns of each bed frame, reminiscent of classic instruction manuals in isometric style. “However, rather than using them as mere instruction, they become animated as patterns, scattered in piles and rendered in bright colours,” Co-founder & Creative Director Matthew Donne tells us. The bright colours too add to Quagga’s personality.

The three colour palette of red, green and blue draws cues from the brand’s three unique bed frames, each with a signature construction technique. “To distinguish between the set, we simply got a little basic, landing on the RGB take,” says Brown, quickly adding, “sometimes, the simplest approach becomes the right approach.”

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Quagga