A week with a clear through-line: identity work moving off the screen and into the world. A digital bank building its brand into billboards, a drawing app finally meeting the people who draw for a living, a typeface engineered to disappear, and the AI poster font that's become the clearest tell going. Plus two small studios worth your attention and a football shirt carrying real weight. Let's get into it.
Nubank takes its brand into physical space with Koto
Nubank, Latin America's largest digital bank, has partnered with global creative company Koto to evolve its brand identity, tone of voice and digital experience. Founded in São Paulo in 2013 on a no-fee credit card, Nubank now serves more than 140 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, with products spanning cards, accounts, loans, investments, insurance and digital assets. The refreshed system is being pushed into out-of-home advertising and large-format environments as the company moves into the United States and launches "Nu Global," per BM Outdoor.
What's interesting here is scale forcing a change of medium. A brand built screen-first for 140 million people now has to hold up at the size of a building, in a market that's never heard of it. That's a different design problem. Digital-native identities tend to be tuned for the feed; making one survive OOH, weather and a cold US audience is where the craft shows.
Affinity for iPad lands, and it's free for individuals
Canva officially launched Affinity for iPad on 2 November 2026, a single app that folds sketching, vector design, photo editing and page layout into one touch-and-Apple-Pencil workflow. It replaces the old routine of jumping between separate apps for each stage: sketch in one, vectorise in another, retouch in a third, lay out in a fourth. The core tools are free for individuals. Creative Boom notes it's been a disheartening year for illustrators, and that it's notable to see Affinity listening to the people who draw for a living. The launch follows Canva's acquisition of Serif, Affinity's maker.
For illustrators who've spent years ferrying files between apps and losing quality at every handoff, one place to sketch, vector and retouch is a real shift. The free-for-individuals move matters too, after a stretch where every tool seemed to grow a subscription. We covered the Serif deal and its fallout in a previous roundup; this is the part where it starts paying off for the people using it.
Swiss Typefaces spends three years making a font nobody should notice
Swiss Post commissioned Swiss Typefaces to build a custom typeface, and the brief ran against the grain of most paid type work. Where clients usually want something distinctive enough to justify the spend, Swiss Post asked for the opposite: a font nobody would notice at all, with clarity and legibility ahead of character. The result, Swiss Post Sans, took more than three years to develop, according to Creative Boom.
Restraint as a brief is harder than it sounds, and more expensive than it looks. Anyone can draw a loud display face; drawing one that works at tiny sizes on a parcel label, in every weather, for years, and still feels warm, is the deep end of the craft. Three years on something designed to vanish is a flex most clients would never pay for. Good on Swiss Post for understanding the difference.
The AI poster font everyone's calling the new Comic Sans
A specific style of bold, aggressive brushstroke lettering with a slight upward slant has become the dead giveaway of AI-generated posters, turning up in cafes, restaurants and on community noticeboards made by small businesses using image generators instead of a designer. People online are calling it the new Comic Sans. Creative Bloq pushes back on that: signage expert Mandy Roscoe of Carrick Signs notes Comic Sans "was originally created to solve a very specific communication problem," and "the problem isn't the font itself. It's when it's used in the wrong context." Comic Sans was rated the world's second most trusted font in 2020.
The irony is almost too neat. A brushstroke style built to fake handmade rebellion has curdled into the most obvious signature of machine generation. ChatGPT's own explanation, quoted in the piece, is that generators link bold brush lettering with "exciting, attention-grabbing design" and simply repeat what's all over their training data. That's the gap between an asset with a hand behind it and a cliché assembled from a billion scraped posters. Comic Sans had a reason to exist. This has a dataset.
Odd Works gives wooden toy brand Toyto a tasteful identity
Odd Works, a studio split between Lisbon and London run by Pavel Ripley and Alina Golubeva, has built the visual identity for Toyto, a Berlin-based maker of old-school open-ended wooden toys: blocks, cubes, rainbows, towers and vehicles. Invented by artists and rooted in humane pedagogy, Toyto's pieces are handmade by carpenters in Eastern Europe, and the brand's pitch is pulling kids off the blue light of screens toward tactile, natural play. This is Odd Works' first move into toy branding, It's Nice That reports.
Kids' branding defaults to primary-colour chaos, so a studio treating a toy brand with the same restraint you'd give a design-led homeware label is a welcome reset. It also fits the product: analogue toys deserve an identity that feels crafted, not screamed. A strong first outing in a category that rarely rewards taste.
Hot Cottage, the studio running Ed Davis's whole creative world
Hot Cottage is a creative studio moving across art direction, graphic design, identity, branding, campaigns, publishing and exhibition design, run by Ed Davis with partners Rob Cordiner and Olivia Radonich. Davis also sits behind a cluster of other projects: Ecstatic Research, a menswear and graphic art venture; Brain Dead, the streetwear brand and creative collective; and Agaric Fly, an incense brand he runs with his son Milo. Hot Cottage handles the branding across many of these, and takes clear joy in the archive, collage and leftfield references.
The appeal here is the refusal to specialise. In an industry that pushes studios to pick a lane and brand themselves to death, a self-described jack of all trades zigzagging between methods reads as a confident move. That it doubles as the engine room for a whole web of linked ventures, profiled by It's Nice That, only makes the breadth more convincing.
Yinka Ilori puts his custom type on a Tottenham away shirt
British-Nigerian designer Yinka Ilori has collaborated with Tottenham Hotspur on a customised version of the club's colourful away shirt. In the usual sponsor-logo spot sits a circular motif combining the club's initials with a London abbreviation and the Tottenham postcode, in bright orange on white. The back wraps the letters COYS in the phrases "I know I am, I'm sure I am" and "We are Tottenham wherever we go." Every bit of lettering uses Ilori's custom typeface, drawn for him by British Standard Type in 2024, Dezeen reports.
Ilori grew up near the stadium, and the shirt reads like it: "a celebration of belonging and the power of football to bring people together," in his words. Custom type usually lives on letterheads and shopfronts; here it's stitched into a garment thousands will wear on the terraces. That's typography doing real cultural work, the kind you can't fake with a template. For a rundown of another club collaboration, see an earlier football-and-design story.
Scale, restraint, free tools and a brushstroke font we'll all be side-eyeing from now on. A good week for anyone who still believes there should be a human hand somewhere in the work. Back next week with more.
