A week with range. A car brand delivering the production payoff of its most argued-over concept, an invisible gaming giant getting the Pentagram treatment, a city government commissioning retail branding with lawsuits attached, and a run of small studios doing exactly the kind of considered, hand-built work that reminds you why human craft still wins. Here's what moved, and why it matters at your desk.
Jaguar's Type 01 lands, and the brand declares itself back
Jaguar pulled the covers off the Type 01 at a closed launch event in New York, its second fully electric production car and the real-world version of the Type 00 concept that detonated across design feeds in 2024. The details, as seen via Dezeen: thin headlights, a long bonnet, a rear-leaning stance, four doors in aluminium, no rear window, and sharp body lines running off what Jaguar calls the "Impossible Panel." Managing director Rawdon Glover put it plainly: "Jaguar's back."
A car is the largest, costliest brand application there is; every panel line is doing the job a logo usually does. Glover said the Type 01 was designed to be a "Jaguar first," powertrain second, which is the whole gamble made physical. After the "Copy Nothing" rebrand got torn apart two years ago, this is where the argument stops being about a wordmark and starts being about sheet metal you can buy.
Pentagram gives Xsolla a retro-futuristic identity
Xsolla is, by one description, "the biggest gaming company you've never heard of," a B2B payments and infrastructure outfit powering digital storefronts, analytics and support behind the scenes. End users only meet it through gameplay texture: in-game currencies, cosmetic customisations, achievement badges. Pentagram partners Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell led the identity, and the brief, covered by It's Nice That, was to brand an entire universe, digital storefronts, currencies, badges and all, pulling from gaming's own visual culture and immersive art forms.
This is the sort of unglamorous, enormous client that almost never surfaces in design press, and getting top-tier studio attention is the interesting part. It's also a marker worth clocking: UI language, currencies and badges, the furniture of games, are now treated as legitimate source material for a serious identity system. That vocabulary has graduated from screen to brand.
New York City names four firms for its municipal grocery stores
The city's Economic Development Corporation picked four studios to build a single brand identity for "N.Y.C. Groceries," five city-owned stores, one per borough, under Mayor Zohran Mamdani's affordability platform. Gander leads on research, strategy, naming and brand development; Librarie co-leads positioning; Noble Signs handles signage meant to feel "authentic to the city"; Seven Roots advises on food retail and integrates the brand in-store. The breakdown of roles comes via Grocery Dive. The first store is due in the Bronx next year.
A government commissioning a from-scratch retail identity at civic scale is rare, and four named firms with distinct, specific roles is unusually transparent for a municipal job. It also comes loaded: the Multicultural Business Coalition and the National Supermarket Association have both filed suits, the latter calling the discount-subsidised stores an illegal monopoly. Branding a politically contested public project is a brief with no quiet corners.
Love And Money builds a tiny custom typeface for Tame Impala's synth
Telepathic Instruments, the hardware company co-founded by Kevin Parker, makes the Orchid, a compact synth that lets you play full chords with a single button press, aimed at beginners and pros alike. The thing sits somewhere between a toy and a chunky analogue childhood object, with some units in transparent shells that read like clear-cased GameBoys. Studio Love And Money built the identity, including a custom tiny typeface, with a floral nod to the name and a celestial lean echoing its sound bank, as detailed by It's Nice That.
Drawing type at a small scale, for a small object, is a craft discipline most briefs never ask for. This is identity work sized to the thing it lives on, from an independent studio punching well above its size. The constraint is the point, and it's the kind of case study worth keeping for when a client hands you something physical and fiddly.
Fjällräven commissions hand-stitched banners from a two-person studio
Miscellaneous Adventures is Emma Groves and her husband Andrew, working out of the Lake District for fifteen years, blending design and illustration backgrounds with a life built around the outdoors. Outdoor brand Fjällräven commissioned them to hand-sew giant banners for its events, made from repurposed leftover gear offcuts, as reported by Creative Boom.
A global brand choosing slow, materially honest craft over a render or a printed vinyl banner is a small act of resistance against the generated-everything default. The provenance is visible in the stitching, and the fact that a big company paid a two-person studio for slow, deliberate work says something about where human-made is heading as a value.
Oh! for OzHarvest wins at the 2026 Australian Good Design Awards
Independent agency Weave took the Communication Design, Print and Packaging category at the 2026 Australian Good Design Awards for "Oh!," its branding for OzHarvest Ventures, a range built from surplus food. The jury said the work "reframes surplus food as something desirable and inviting," and praised the name for working as an emotional reaction, a mnemonic for OzHarvest and a punctuation device, anchored by its exclamation mark. Executive creative director Dan Cookson wanted people to see surplus food as "something you'd want to pick up off the shelf," per Mediaweek.
An Australian independent agency landing the country's biggest design honour for making food waste desirable through wit is a home-turf result worth celebrating on its own terms. It's a packaging win built on a hard idea, solved cleanly. Good to see the award go to the studio that cracked the brief.
Big metal, invisible infrastructure, civic shelves and hand-stitched fabric: a week that ran the full gamut from mega-agency to two people in the Lake District. The small studios are the ones we'll be watching. If branding work is your patch, we've got plenty of type and mockups worth a dig. Back next week.
