Simple Beautiful Things
Simple Beautiful Things is a family-led business gathering thoughtful lifestyle pieces that bring the quiet pleasure to everyday life.
As they’ve grown, the team found that their original brand identity was unscalable and no longer relevant. This led us to create a package that spoke to the essence and duality of Simple Beautiful Things – a quiet haven housing natural handcrafted goods, sitting on the outskirts of the bustling Sydney CBD.
INDUSTRY
Lifestyle
DELIVERABLE
Visual Identity
ROLE
Lead Designer
Whilst I usually strive to find inspiration beyond our immediate bubble, it was evident that we had to research into brands that looked liked Simple Beautiful Things – i.e. those with longer names – so we could dissect their clarity, flexibility and layout. Some of our key references were Handcrafted Modern and Australian Chamber Orchestra, where we found multiple logo variations were needed for different formats.
Through our iterations, serif styles emerged as the best reflection of Simple Beautiful Thing's timeless quality, which led us to Quincy CF for the base typeface. From here, we refined the wordmark through custom alignment, kerning and subtle letterform modifications to reduce visual clutter and create a cleaner, softer and more cohesive logo.
As a family owned business, the original visual identity of Simple Beautiful Things was still held close to the team's heart, so we made the choice to refine the supporting elements of the brand, rather than reinvent.
This approach was most evident in selecting our colour palette, where we reduced their extensive 12-coloured palette down to 6 (excluding black and white). The short-listed colour were in reflection of the brand ethos "being thoughtful in nature", whilst ensuring that any combination of lights and darks has a colour contrast for over 4.5 to 1, for accessibility.
