Oliver Grace anchors Redheads in Swiss Modernism and a flexible grid

Founded in 1946, Redheads is one of those brands most Australians have simply always known – its matches, firelighters and BBQ fuel have been sold through major grocery stores for the better part of a century, anchored by Ms Redheads, a mascot whose hair, eyes and posture have shifted with each decade she has appeared in. Melbourne-based brand and user experience studio Oliver Grace was tasked with refreshing the identity for a contemporary audience and extending it across a new direct-to-consumer site, where nostalgia-led homewares and merchandise sit alongside the core range. The studio’s first move was archival. Working through the evolution of Redheads’ wordmarks across the 20th century, they identified the late 1960s and early 1970s as the most useful reference point – a moment when Swiss Modernist thinking had filtered into mainstream packaging and Redheads’ own marks had moved away from the ornate scripts and traditional serifs of earlier decades. “The simple, grid-based nature of this approach also allowed us the greatest flexibility when designing for a whole family of different products with varied package sizes and ratios,” Creative Director Nick Lehrain tells us. The reference is therefore both historical and practical: a period of the brand’s own past that happens to solve the problem in front of them. The resulting wordmark sits in Fusion Grotesk from Blaze Type, set bold and oversized across the front of every pack. Lehrain and his team trialled a wide range of neo-grotesque sans serifs in situ before settling on it. “It’s really well balanced but also has enough of the nice little quirks that were typical of early grotesques, including the tails on characters like the lowercase ‘l,’ ‘t,’ and ‘a,’ which help make the brand warm and approachable,” he explains. The choice ties the typography to the same late-century moment as the wider system without leaning into predictable pastiche.