Chocolate, Solar Panels, and Wide Body Kits.

Typography crimes from WHSmith, halftone patterns, and gold foil debossing.

Goodness me, three months in a row?

Hello again, and a warm welcome to new subscribers — thanks for joining the club. I’ve found quite a few interesting design bits through January — you'll likely find something intriguing here, too.

WHSmith’s horrific rebrand ‘experiment’. 😬

Brand downgrade of the year | Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

2023 ended with a joyously chaotic branding exercise from WHSmith, British retailer of train station sandwiches, pencil cases, and gift cards from Grandma.

Essentially, they dropped their serif’d WHSmith in favour of an eerily NHS-like WHS, presented with all the typographic sensitivities of a Word document. In some textbook backpedaling, the company confirmed that it was “Just an experiment, bro”, and we haven’t heard anything since. Phew.

I decided to spend a whopping 60 seconds of my time on my own baseless rebrand for them. It still doesn’t really mean anything, or do anything, but at least it looks better. This concludes the angsty portion of the newsletter.

This took me about a minute in Figma, and it’s fine.

Buddy’s Chococo branding 🍫

Dang chocolatey | © Buddy Creative Ltd

Exeter-based design studio Buddy Creative have refreshed the luxury chocolate company, Chococo. The brand makes use of a wide colour palette and geometric elements that look enticingly nibbleable. It makes me think of Elmer the Patchwork Elephant, picnics, board games, and simpler times.

Free audiobooks! 📖

I’ve really been enjoying listening to books, so I have of course been bombarded with Audible ads. But what’s better than giving your money to Jeff Bezos? Using a public library to access a huge range of audiobooks on your phone for free! Some libraries allow you to register even if you don’t live nearby, expanding your options. Libby is my favourite app from a UX perspective, but they’re all very serviceable.

Solar-powered website ☀️

This is how the cloud works, right?

Most small websites, including my own, are powered by shared hosting on a server farm somewhere in the internet ether. Not this one. LOW←TECH MAGAZINE is an online publication that’s running on a Raspberry Pi in Barcelona, hooked up to some solar panels and a battery.

Sometimes, when there hasn’t been enough sun, the site just… goes down. And that’s okay; it’ll be up again in the morning. While obviously impractical for most cases, I’m rather fond of the concept of the internet going to sleep.

You can read much more about the magazine’s design, including the green design considerations to limit power consumption. Of course, I can shamelessly plug that I’ve written about this too 👇

Lowering the Carbon Footprint of your Digital Design

3-series halftone awesomeness

Lastly, highlighting a fun personal project from Sean Proctor that I spotted on LinkedIn. Halftone! Speed lines! Widebody kits! Chromatic aberration! From the pacing to the camera angles, it’s a beautifully stylised tribute to the design icon that is the BMW M3 E30.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading, and I hope you found something cool in that list. What was your favourite?

It’s hard for me to pick, but I think the solar-powered website was the most exciting discovery for me. Most things involving a Raspberry Pi give me nerd-butterflies.

Finally, an unprompted gush of saccharine appreciation — thank you so much for reading. I get buckets of joy from writing these emails for a small group of people, and it feels like I’m getting the hang of the concept. I’m not here to grow or build or hustle, but to have a closer and more meaningful connection to friends and strangers in contrast to social media.

Best wishes,
Tom 🐢

👥 Socials
👔 LinkedIn
📸 Instagram
🌍 My website