Consider Jony Ive’s impact on design, and you undoubtedly picture modern Apple products: pared-back industrial forms, distilled to essential components. This restraint somehow elevates the mass-produced goods into design objects of understated elegance. An iPhone is a visual whisper, drawing you in to listen more closely.
But Ive’s first public project since founding his own design collective, LoveFrom, is an aesthetic 180 from what you might expect. Alongside his team, Ive developed a seal for Terra Carta, an environmental initiative spearheaded by Prince Charles. (The seal is awarded to companies that distinguish themselves in the realm of sustainability.)
Minimal and industrial? Not at all. The seal is organic, covered in filigree and fauna to celebrate the natural world. Birds, bees, and butterflies float through a weave of flowering vines. Ladybugs crawl over the wordsTerra Carta.In truth, Ive considers this typeface, not the Terra Carta seal itself, to be LoveFrom’s first public release. “Because it really does span the physical world and the digital world,” he says. “And it speaks to our respect for the past, and that informs our work for the future.”
To design LoveFrom Serif, Ive’s team studied original Baskerville punches and matrices. They analyzed the shapes and cleaned them up into digital characters. From there, the team began making Baskerville their own, adding details inspired by other lettering work of the era.
That colorful Terra Carta seal lives in the digital world comfortably: It was drawn with both a green and white backing, though it has also been designed in several monochrome variants. (In the future, don’t be surprised to see an animated version, either, in which the insects crawl and flutter.) The seal also lives in the physical world. Crafted with the assistance of British paper mill James Cropper, it’s made through a combination of printing, embossing, die-cutting, and micro-perforating. For the seal’s intricate illustration, LoveFrom worked with renowned artist Peter Horridge.
“We didn’t want there to be a sense of value derived from the use of inherently expensive materials. And so it was quite challenging,” Ive says. “I think it’s a very particular space where you’re sitting between what is essentially graphic and what clearly is an object in three dimensions. That’s a space that is occupied by coins and metals. And I think that there is, therefore, a sort of gravity and authority, perhaps, in the way we tried to treat the form.”
Indeed. That paper seal looks expensive.
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