Tangent GC Natural Wash by Carl Nas Associates — BP&O
Words from Richard Baird
Tangent GC started out as a Scandinavian organic apparel and shoe care company developing products designed to extend the life of clothing and footwear, and entered the organic skin care market in 2016. The longevity of the skin is an understandable extension of this original intention.
The company's graphic identity, a typographic system designed by Essen International under the creative direction of Carl Nas, created an informative immediacy due to the lack of unnecessary stylistic details and colors, effectively divided content and differentiated in arrangement, orientation and type by Akkurat Mono.
When Tangent GC entered the organic personal skin care market, the company worked with London based Carl Nas Associates to develop the visual language that Carl Nas originally set as creative director at Essen International. In this new phase, the studio applied this graphic system to skin care packaging, a soap series and organic hand cream, which were supported by campaigns with swirling fabrics and illustrations by the famous airbrush artist Syd Brak.
Carl Nas Associates will continue to work with Tangent GC through 2020. This time he is converting his range of organic detergents and expanding the graphic language of the type and its arrangement through a tailored structural design into a form and material language. The detergents are available in two sizes: 500 ml and 1000 ml. They cover everything from everyday washing liquids to special products such as cashmere and hypoallergenic products.
The graphic system developed by Carl Nas is so subtle that every new design component that is incorporated into this system, be it a campaign illustration for the perfumed hand cream or a work of art for the special editions, requires just as much care and sensitivity as the detergents themselves. Structural Design is one of those ways to differentiate a brand that uses a lot of commercial jars and introduce tactile feedback to give graphic design and branding a more visceral recall.
With such a reducing but unmistakable visual identity and labeling system, the tailored structural designs made of light bioplastic from renewable raw materials are a fantastic approach to expand the visual language into the material. It's easy to imagine how they would feel in your hand. Small considerations such as the extrapolation of the radius of the labels into the bottle structure, the matte finish and the robust closures offer subtle elements that fit perfectly with a brand that naturally strives for longevity of clothing and longevity in skin care. The joy here lies in the resolution of a dichotomy, the interface between benefit and care.
It is worth considering the careful balance of the volume of the liquid and the proportions of the containers across two different pack sizes, their relationship to each other and the continued brand continuity. Bioplastics have a remarkable surface quality that will likely become recognizable over time and hopefully will be established as a more universal language of materials.
It doesn't happen often that blogs use previous reviews to see how a product has evolved over time and how they evolve and last (or not) over time. We often get the start, this idealistic starting point, the one that gets the clicks, but we rarely see the robustness of the concept and the usefulness of the system over time, especially in such an understated way. This post is not about the seductive appeal of colors and the typographic zeitgeist, but about seeing how a design studio has established a functional and adaptable visual language and then also managed to insert a new language of materials and shapes while maintaining this essential Nuance and specialty of the brand. More by Carl Nas Associates on BP&O.
Design: Carl Nas Associates. Opinion: Richard Baird. Fonts used: Accurate mono.
Tangent GC from Carl Nas Associates
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