Urban
A brand built from nothing — logo, system, and packaging across 12 variants.
Brand identity · Design system · Packaging · Marketing
The braiding hair category was visually homogeneous — soft, pastel, gentle. Brands were difficult to distinguish from one another on the shelf. Urban was a new brand with nothing yet: no visual language, no system. It needed to stand out without abandoning the category entirely, and do so across 12 different product styles.
I led everything — logo design, colour system, typography, packaging across all 12 variants, marketing materials, and social. Full ownership from concept to shelf.
The concept came from the name: Urban — street, graffiti, raw texture. I built the entire visual language around that idea. Grunge-style black splashes run across the pack — not decorative drops but something more deliberate and rough-edged. The overall palette is black and white, which gave the range a strong, unified presence on the shelf.
The logo is my own handwriting. I spent half a day writing it in different ways until it felt right — a handwritten mark was the correct choice because it carries the graffiti energy that a constructed typeface wouldn't have. It needed to feel like it belonged on that brick wall.
The differentiation solution was simple: each style has its own colour, applied consistently in specific places — under the style name, on the hangtag, on the wrap — so the colour does the work of identification without fragmenting the range. Black and white holds everything together. The colour tells you which one is yours.
Urban became a category best-seller. The system proved scalable — the brand later expanded into sub-brands built on the same visual foundation, while each finding their own character within it.
