Nice Things
Brand Development | Identity System
Nice Things is a design retail store located in a smaller community. It will sell curated items for your home, your body, and for those you love. This was developed in my MCAD MAGWD dynamic identities course.
Brand Position
Small places deserve nice things.
Design Scope
Establish a dynamic visual identity system.
Core Values
- Beauty is a necessity, not a luxury. Nice things provide small, daily joys.
- People should have access to quality, handcrafted, or designed objects that they can use forever.
- Curating the things in our lives should be a meaningful and delightful practice.
- Healthy local economies need pathways to support craftspeople and artists.
Inspiration: Handcrafted Object Library
For a shop selling handcrafted items and art, it was important that the identity also be handcrafted.
I physically created the object library using cut paper to preserve a trace of materiality, similar to what you see in potato prints, and lino or wood block prints.
This library can be added to over time, based on what new things Nice Things stocks.
Creative Concept & Approach
Many items stocked in Nice Things will have an element of handcraft, such as hand-sewn garments, hand-spun textiles, hand-thrown pottery, hand-dipped candles, etc.
For the brand to retain an element of that bespoke, hand-made quality, I cut two-dimensional shapes and then digitized these to form the graphic language. Objects can be used at different scales or in different colors.
Moodboard: Object Library Applied
These varied, colorful brands grounded in images, shapes, and colors guided my approach for Nice Things. I appreciate the way they play with scale and how central shapes are to their identity.
Static Elements
While the object library can be added to over time and the objects scaled up and down, the logo — derived using the typeface Heiy, fonts, and colors are consistent across assets.
Establishing Art
These assets show, at the most conceptual level, how the Nice Things visual identity can be applied.
Assets features asymmetrical color background blocks, text overlays, and objects scaled to be more descriptive and literal vs. enlarged to serve as patterns.
