Good enough to eat: Accompany’s tasteful identity for cultured meat innovator Vow is a visual party

Let’s face it, meat is delicious. For a lot of us, it’s an indispensable part of our diet, but the toll that breeding livestock takes on our planet is not pretty. And Earth, really, only has so much land. This is an equation that Vow, a cultured meat innovator, is trying to contribute to by creating delicious and innovative foods that are not only good for our taste buds, but also for our health and the planet. To prep for their debut consumer brand and product launch, Vow reached out to Sydney-based design studio Accompany to craft an identity that would match the energy of their inventive, go-getter team and company. The resulting brand is a visual party – a mixed-media “mash-up of vivid colours, snapshotty photography, organic animations, surrealist collages, energetic typography and handwritten annotations,” describes Founder & Executive Creative Director Linda Jukic. The identity needed to speak in a language that resonated with Vow’s voice, to allow the start-up to scale up the company to attract the right investors and like-minded people to join the team. A lot of the heavy lifting in setting the scene for the identity is done by the set of typefaces that Accompany handpicked – there’s Muoto Condensed for headlines, Messina Condensed for short blocks of text, Neue Montreal for UI details and Juniper Bay for the annotation-style one-liners peppered throughout the brand. “Muoto Condensed exudes confidence, with a hint of playfulness that thoughtfully offsets the flourishes in the logo and the lively, imaginative nature of the collages, illustrations and cell animations,” Jukic tells us. The annotations, on the other hand, hint at the humans behind the innovation that fuels Vow. “The handwriting component was a crucial layer in the font suite, adding a tactile quality that resonates with the brand’s values,” she adds. “We drew inspiration from the spontaneous, imperfect notes and sketches of their scientists and chefs, seeking a font that embodies the same sense of authenticity and human touch.”