Watch the logo grow,
Madalena Studio developed the identity for a London (UK) drinks and flavour lab called Crucible. Here’s more about the design studio that created a brand identity grown in a petri dish, from an August 30, 2024 article by Hunter Schwarz for Fast Company, Note: Links have been removed,
The design industry of late is rife with innovation labs and incubators churning out projects. But the designers behind a new logo took the concept of design incubator much more literally: They grew it from actual bacterial cultures.
Crucible, an experimental drinks lab and consultancy in London, worked on the mark with its longtime London-based creative collaborator Madalena Studio. And while the logo may not suit a consumer-facing brand, it’s effective in communicating the science behind Crucible’s process in a super memorable way.
To develop the logo, the Crucible and Madalena Studio teams swabbed a laser-cut, cork version of it with samples from aged kombucha, a liquid culture of lions mane, household food waste, and swabs from skin and soil solutions. The samples were then grown in petri dishes in a makeshift incubator. A dynamic version of the logo, which shows spores spreading and changing color from pink to green, now welcomes visitors to Crucible’s website.
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When he [Chris Collicott, founder and creative director of Madalena Studio] and designer Oliwia Mendel arrived at the idea of growing the logo from bacteria, “it was an idea that just sat right,” he says. And sure, it’s an out-of-the-box technique, but type experimentation is pretty commonplace nowadays, and this pushes that experimentation even further. It’s also a spot-on representation of a brand that works behind the scenes with the science of taste.
“We didn’t know if it would work, or how it would turn out, but for those reasons it felt exactly the right way to go,” Collicott says. “When we presented our original grown tests to Crucible, I think they felt the same.” Crucible is playful and fun, and its work with Madalena Studio has helped “position [the company] far away from the Victoriana of the drinks world,” Collicott says, referring to the oft-used nostalgic look of beverage packaging inspired by the 19th-century Victorian era.
An August 19, 2024 article by Olivia Hingley for It’s Nice That provides other details about the lab-grown logo,
Working with nearly 25 samples of home-grown bacteria, this identity for Crucible feels more like a biology project than work of graphic design.
Crucible describes itself as a laboratory, collaborative workspace and creative hub specifically targeted at beverage sellers, servers and enthusiasts. Founded in 2017 by Stuart Bale, with three person the team [sic] now made up of Aska Hayakawa and Maja Jaworska, the lab also offers drinks consultancy. The big focus for Crucible is an experimental approach to flavour, something often helped by working at a microbial level. It was this fact that sparked an idea for Chris Collicott, founder of Madalena Studio. To create a fresh look for Crucible, Chris wanted to reflect its very real, hands-on process, and so he decided to investigate live bacteria.
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At the beginning of the project, Chris and Oliwia Mendel, Madalena’s designer, bounced ideas back and forth to find a strong visual basis that was rooted in the creation of drinks; they went from bubbles, to liquid textures, before landing on bacteria. “Anything digital just felt a bit lacking and inauthentic,” says Chris, and so the team steered clear of typical visual approaches to reflecting science, like lines of code, for instance.
But, with bold visions come complex production, especially as Chris and Oliwia decided to grow the bacteria themselves. “We had no idea if this would actually work, what the outcome could even look like, or if Crucible would even go for it, but on a quiet Friday afternoon I laser cut the C logo from cork, ordered some petri dishes and we got started,” says Chris. They swabbed each cork logo with an array of substances; aged kombucha, liquid culture of lions mane, household food waste, swabs from skin and soil solutions, before putting them in the petri dishes, and then placing them in “relatively lo-fi lab conditions”: a local makeshift incubator (the basement of Chris’ flat).
s Chris was intent on creating moving assets, the team had to regularly shoot the growing bacteria. Every few hours for nearly two weeks Chris captured the changes of ten to 15 samples, even through the night. … After growing and photographing the samples, the only edits Chris and Oliwia made were altering some colours to align with Crucible’s trademark neon, day-glo palette. …
You can find out more about the Madalena Studio here and Crucible here.