Precise, technical, but also darn witty: newkid creates a brand of contrasts for Standard Equipment

At first look, Standard Equipment’s range of furniture and home goods stands out for its utilitarian beauty and industrial precision. You’d expect a brand so technical to sound all business and serious, but not when newkid is the one building the brand world. “As algorithms have driven an increasing standardisation of taste and lifestyle, we saw an opportunity to flip the idea of standardisation in the company name on its head, to position Standard Equipment as the creators of ‘Tools for Non-Standard Living,’” newkid’s Co-founder & Creative Director Matthew Donne tells us. To highlight the concept, the studio threaded “moments of wit and personality into the details,” from the colour palette that brightens the identity to the snappy product copy that leans into the ‘non-standard’ side of the brand. The logo, though, is all about the mechanical accuracy that powers the Canadian company’s products. “The logo was custom-designed to not only create visual impact (with a thick, singular form) but to also channel the industrial design language used by Standard Equipment itself – the curves in the logomark reflect the exact specifications of the standardised curves that are used across their products,” says Donne. The motion assets build on this story, such as the short motion clip of the ‘SE’ logo, rendered in steel, being “screwed together.” Elsewhere, the grid-based visual system and the two supporting typefaces – Apparat and Waldenburg, both by Kimera Corp – add to the technical aesthetic. “In selecting typefaces for Standard Equipment, we were looking for fonts that felt quite systematic and ‘industrial’ while also having small marks of character and quirk to distinguish the brand,” Donne explains. The search led the team to the duo of typefaces. “The two typefaces are incorporated in the full logomark (which combines the logo, brand name and tagline) to establish the hierarchy reflected in the wider design system – Apparat for titles and headlines and Waldenburg for paragraphs and technical specifications.”