Move over alt sweeteners: Zeus Jones’ identity injects joy into Oobli’s game-changing sweet proteins

When Zeus Jones took on the project to design the identity for Oobli – a new brand championing sweet proteins – they knew that the challenges thay lay ahead were complex. Not only did they have to present the intricacies of Oobli’s pioneering technology in a digestible way, but also break through the noise of diet culture, and cut the guilt associated with consuming sugar. “There’s a lot of suspicion when it comes to alt sweeteners, and rightfully so. A lot of brands don’t hesitate to exploit diet-culture fears and tropes,” shares Creative Jordana Rothman. “For us, this project became about finding a new way to enter this conversation – a brand that was fluent in more progressive and holistic ideas about health, and that could do its part in restoring pleasure and intuition to the act of eating.” “The health food category is still defined by this dated idea of what it means to be healthy – that the path to health is joyless; paved with compromise, sacrifice and self-restraint,” shares Strategist Ellie Burkett. “Oobli’s sweet proteins mean that those kinds of compromises don’t have to exist.” To really celebrate the brand’s passion for restoring the joy of sweetness, Zeus Jones embraced a buoyant, energetic tone, both for the identity and the messaging. Leading with this approach, the team opted for a chonky wordmark, gestural illustrations by Meredith Schomburg, and a saturated palette with punch and presence, “to stand out from the soft pastels typically seen in most D2C food and wellness brands,” notes Designer Alex Register. For the wordmark, Typeverything’s Champ emerged as a tasteful choice. The team tweaked the typeface slightly, by adding “tilted axes for the bowls and accentuated ink traps,” and paired it with a stylised version of Dinamo’s Ginto Nord as the display typeface. “We wanted the brand to have an exuberant, bouncy sort of character and Ginto Nord’s heavier weights, with their contrast and curvy forms, fit that so well. We then used Dinamo’s customiser tool to select default stylistic alternates to push that character even further,” reveals Register. Rounding off the type treatment, the team selected Roobert as the supporting typeface, to temper the expressiveness of Ginto Nord.