The Brand: ofirbeauty.com
The Mission:
To create a makeup brand at the crossroad of Performance Cosmetics and Clean Beauty. With a limited budget allocated to packaging, forcing curation rather than a custom design.
The Process:
I always like to start by the limitations, here it was the stock packaging, which doesn’t allow for custom colors. Black and being the default in the industry, I picked black, as a more timeless and elevated choice.
I was initially inspired by the work of Simone Cavalini, an Italian artist. It took me on a road of geometry, angles and gradient colors.
I then balanced that strong point-of-view with a lighter approach to typography using a fun Serif and photography with fresh faces and lighter backgrounds.
The result is a well balanced esthetic that speaks beauty, somewhere weirdly set between a Nars and a Saie.
The Identity:
OFIR’s brand Identity is centered around its logo, strong color contrasts, and geometry. The logo is a custom adaptation from the calligraphic serif typeface Ogg designed by Lucas Sharp. It was inspired by the hand lettering of twentieth-century calligrapher Oscar Ogg, which gives our brand a natural romanticism and lyrical aspect balanced with the “all-cap” treatment of the font, for an edgy final look.
The Palette:
is mainly black and white, with a short array of colors reminding of the shades of powders and rouges you usually find in the beauty world.
The Fonts:
To complement the Ogg legacy of the logo, 2 types of font were selected. Google fonts being requested by our development team, the selection settled on Gilda Display for the Serif option backed by Railway for the Body text portion, perfect for its sans-serif supporting role.
The Photography:
In continuation with the contrasted geometry that has been my main inspiration since the beginning, the brand’s photography makes no exception. Dramatic angles, black or colorful backgrounds, mirror play, and exaggerated shadows, add a sense of drama to our otherwise, minimal packaging, and overall look.
Product Development:
A big part of the Incubation process is of course defining the products. When it comes to Beauty, both formulation and packaging matter, and must be connected to the Brand identity at all times. As we aimed to set OFIR at the confluent of performance and clean beauty, we wanted to design building blocks for any beauty routine.
Our packaging results from an endless curation, to find the most unique and interesting shapes, to which we added the minimal look of a White Deco on Black Glossy. Silver and Gold accents are added here and there, for some foreseen hero products in the line.
The Website:
We opted for a minimal, yet efficient website design, allowing healthy imagery placement, with system text organized around it, using our Brand fonts and Palette.
Social Presence:
Social media is your actual Retail Window. This is how you introduce your Brand in one glance to your potential new customers, and keep contact and relevancy with your existing ones. It must ultimately carry the Brand Indenty while bringing the campaign storytelling are wanting to push.
Online Ads:
Online Ads are about capturing the attention in mere few seconds and making the user slow down their scroll and hopefully, stop and click through. It is, therefore, crucial to keep the subject of the ad simple, unique, and eye-catching.
To that effect, the direction for the brand’s ad design is about collages, dramatic cut-outs and intense close-ups.
Emails:
Your email list is incredibly valuable, on some levels, more valuable than your social followers, because a subscriber is already engaged, and often time an actual customer.
This makes email deliverability the top priority for the design style. And for that reason, the choice of a coded template rather than a sliced master image.
That choice isn’t popular in the creative world because it is highly limited. Compatible Type Fonts, size, padding, or text treatment aren’t flexible at all.
But as often, the more limitations you have, the more obvious the solution is.
