Meet Salt and Sister Studio, the sibling duo railing against boring branding and industry jargon

As it goes, Heidi El-Kholy and Halah El-Kholy (the sibling duo behind Salt and Sister Studio) describe themselves as “altogether pretty unserious people”, but when it comes to their work, it’s a different story. Since founding the studio, the pair have gravitated toward projects that address social issues, amassing a client list they’re truly proud of; “a radically-inclusive bookshop in Stoke; a dance company that tells the stories of and with Othered communities in Newcastle, organisations making art accessible to marginalised communities in Liverpool, and an art collective that challenges, critiques and reimagines hopeful futures through a critical lens of colonialism, ecology and migration”, to name just a few.

With Halah on design and Heidi on words, the pair are equally as dedicated to eradicating boring branding as they are to making industry jargon a thing of the past. They describe their practice as “an active resistance to working in restrictive toxic white office spaces and prescriptive boring branding”. Instead, they “empower our clients to be authentically, idiosyncratically themselves”. They continue: “We love to talk about important things that we’d previously been told had ‘no place in the office’. The work we do is always with accessibility and people of the global majority in mind.”

When it comes to visuals, Heidi and Halah love neons, textures and gradients, as well as 90s adverts, cinema, SWANA art, fruit stickers and WordArt. This penchant for colour and nostalgia is evident, with every project saturated in bright hues, and retro visuals injected with a modern edge – for instance, the duo’s branding work for Drop City Books, which brings the energy of 90s New York to the streets of Stoke.