Responses by Adam Vella, creative director and partner, Standard Projects.
Background: RE is a cocktail bar in Sydney that rethinks wasteful practices. From the materials and supply chain, all the way down to the drinks, everything you touch and drink is diverted from landfill. This means that the drinks menu changes based on what produce is in season and what comes RE’s way, so it’s constantly reinventing the wheel when it comes to the cocktails it’s making and figuring out production. Located in Sydney’s trendy business district Inner West, RE wants to change perceptions of reuse, which appeals to a young, culturally connected and sustainably minded audience.
Design thinking: RE takes something unexpected—waste, essentially—and turns it into something beautiful. It’s science meets old-world traditions of extracting and combining flavor. In the hands of RE’s owner and master mixologist, the discarded produce becomes new and exciting drinks you’ve probably never tasted.
When conceptualizing the identity, the first thing that occurred to us was the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi—seeing the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. We wanted to tell a story of transformation, so we used a double-sided approach, juxtaposing the traditional with the experimental. We contrasted two different styles of fonts—the first functional, the second ultra-expressive—to create RE’s unique marks. Franklin Gothic, the supporting brand typeface, is weighty and bold, reflecting the industrial history and context of the area and balancing the expressive spirit of the identity with refinement and order.
Challenges: RE was open for only a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and Sydney went into lockdown. The client had to be even more inventive and pragmatic about how to make RE work and keep it going. There was a lot of demand for the drinks, so we had to rethink how they were packaged, sold and delivered. The bottle label was utilitarian and structured, contrasted by the color of the drink inside, with one small logo that would differ on every label. Everything was done by hand during lockdown, so we had to figure out a solution that enabled the team to print, apply and seal the bottles and boxes themselves, as well as delivering around Sydney.
New lessons: It’s rare that we get a brief that calls for so much freedom of expression. Our background is more in commercial brands and digital experiences, so it’s not often that we’re given full autonomy to experiment and do whatever we want. It’s actually harder than it seems. As designers, we always want to make things consistent across all applications, so we had to think about how to make it inconsistent but still work. Usually, it’s about optimizing a logo from large to small, but here those sorts of questions didn’t feature—the more we didn’t think about it, the better.
Specific project demands: Things were changing pretty rapidly at the time because of COVID, so we had to make sure we got things done quickly. That way, the business could adapt to what was happening, such as not being able to host people on the premises. We had to solve problems quickly, which is really what design is for. Suddenly, we couldn’t meet or show prototypes to the client in person, so we had to record videos showing the team how to fold menus, where to position the label on each bottle and how to print labels in-house. There was a lot of trust; it was up to them to make sure they delivered the concept in production.
Favorite details: We’re proud of how well the RE brand has come together as a concept and how well it reads in the environment. People say it feels out there yet considered, which was the objective. It has qualities of minimalism mixed with radical expressionism. We’re proud that it works for the client and does what it needs to do for their business—and ultimately, that they love it.
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