Studio Nari’s brand identity for Living Things makes gut health look fun... and pretty refreshing

The Studio Nari team have had a super busy start to the year with lots of exciting projects ready to launch – one being a vibrant new identity and brand strategy for Living Things, a probiotic soda brand with a conscious stance — a ‘soda for humans’, that’s made with natural, gut friendly ingredients and with the planet in mind.

Fresh on the scene and yet to make their visual debut on shop shelves, Living Things came to Nari for “the full package”, Nari’s design lead Tom Bacon says, “which we always love as it gives us the scope to be involved from the start, and create a brand with really strong foundations”. By crafting a brief together, the design agency rolled out a thought-out brand strategy for the probiotic soda, seeing an interesting gap in the game of health conscious drinks brands to “create something that feels playfully irreverent, and feel-good, but without being too earnest or virtuous”.

The brand’s name was one the studio landed on quite quickly, and was at once “a firm favourite”, shares Tom. Now a brand that was named and “truly alive”, Nari wanted to build the soda company’s visual identity to feel like it was part of something bigger — “a world that reaches far beyond gut health, or soft drinks”, engaging both millennial and Gen Z audiences, communicating great health benefits, but also great taste. So from the offset, the creative agency knew their word mark needed to pack some punch and stand out on an oversaturated market — something Studio Nari does best.

Holding its own on shelves and packs, Nari’s customised wordmark uses rounded edges and odd quirks to give the drink “a feel good vibe”. Similarly, they wanted a typeface that linked to their brand strategy, something that was full of life— they landed on Pangram’s Agrandir. “It’s a bit bonkers, but in just the right way”, says Tom. The Soda company’s visual catalogue was designed for cans to look “as at home in a trendy deli in London as it does in a regional superstore”, and have a “friendly approachable and human feel” that was full of vitality.

Building on their feel-good visuals, the agency’s sticker graphics playfully populate the brands image on and off packs. A great way to condense information, these initially started out as a more functional tool for the studio to translate some of the company’s messages on friendly bacteria and the gut microbiome into bite size facts and phrases. “There’s a lot of mystique and confusion in the functional soda space, and we wanted to make sure the brand could effortlessly deliver key pieces of info in a way that didn’t feel too virtuous, or like a boring list that no one would read,” Tom tells us.

The wiggly shapes of these sticker graphics, though, were cleverly created to look like “a biome of friendly bacteria”, a visual world the studio turned to over the current market of more functional soda for their inspiration. As for the happy sun motif (which we love), this is just another way “to make the viewer smile”, says Tom.