The Edit: five new projects including Bao & Bing by Matinée

Each and every day, we're lucky to discover dozens of interesting and inspiring projects from around the world. From global identities and campaigns to side projects and independently published books, The Edit is home to five of them; every two weeks. Bao & Bing is a Taiwanese street food-inspired restaurant and cocktail bar located in the heart of London’s Marylebone district. Both their menu and interiors pay homage to the bustling night markets of Taipei while reflecting Jiufen’s decadent mountainside teahouses. London-based design agency Matinée, commissioned to develop Bao & Bing’s identity system, gained inspiration from Taipei’s throwaway printed materials such as lottery tickets, price tags and lamppost cards. At the core of the identity is a bubble-tea inspired ampersand which acts as a seal of approval across signage, menus and the restaurant’s very own wheel cakes. Building on the success of their tonic and soda ranges, Melbourne-based drinks company StrangeLove saw an opportunity to enter the sparkling water market. ‘Another drink by StrangeLove’ is the result, a canned sparkling water with zero sugar, zero calories and all-natural flavours. When designing the packaging, Auckland-based Marx Design looked at the periodic table, noticing a parallel between computer-generated ASCII code and the water’s mineral content and PH levels. As they’d done with other StrangeLove products, the studio employed the strategy of “borrowing from the past to modernise the future”, creating a visual language inspired by 1980’s computer graphics. The result embraces the idea that water is made from many individual properties joined together.