Identity & Packaging for Handle by Iya Studio

Handle is an innovative start up with a circular approach and a strong belief that used beauty packaging isn't waste, but a raw material which can be repurposed. They collect beauty packaging from salons, retailers and consumers, then recycle and repurpose the different materials to create a premium range of beauty accessories, all the handles are made entirely from the material they recycled. What materials they don't use, they sell back to the manufacturers of beauty packaging to be used again.

We worked with the founders from the early stages, creating the visual identity which we rolled out across packaging, print and digital. The brand visual takes its fluid forms from the patterns in the compressed material and typographic treatments using a sans and serif, which reinforces the process of repurposing of different elements to make something new.

Game feel is a big part of experiential design, especially so in the case of designing an interactive room. We wanted to portray ourselves as a Machiavellian megacorporation named “Aethos Corp” to create a foreboding atmosphere to prime participants before entering our installation on the night of Open Studio.

To do so, I began designing a brand for Aethos Corp. First, I started with a logo. We bounced some ideas back and forth in our Discord server. You can see our developments in the image below.

Initially, in 1, I was trying to go down a path similar to the design of the megacorporations in Mirror’s Edge. James thought the text looked too book-ish, and I agreed, it wasn’t quite what we were going for. I tried some abstract layering in images 2-4 for inspiration. In 5, the analogy of squares inside squares for the simulation was made. 7 added a better font. 8 was an attempt to make the visual design of the logo simpler, more suitable for a corporation as their logo should be easily made out at a glance. In 9 I tried some of the overlaying stuff I was doing before, as a sort of glitch-esque look, but that wasn’t what we were going for in the end. Marked in red outline are designs Jack made and in green, those by Ben. With 11, Jack was on the right track. 13 was nice too, but it was too reminiscent of Assassin’s Creed’s Abstergo. 14 looked like a play button - no go. In the end we thought that 11 looked right, but needed a final pass to make it a bit better, so I made the lines of shape thinner and added some appropriate typography.