Growing the bacteria using kombucha, lion’s mane, household food waste, and swabs from skin and soil resulted in some sleepless nights for creative director Chris Collicott.
If somebody had told me that you could use live bacteria to create brightly coloured patterns from the 1980s and ’90s, I would have been a bit sceptical. That was until I came across the drinks and flavour agency Crucible’s identity, which was designed by Madalena Studio.
It took me a minute to understand why a company would use bacteria to encourage drinks businesses to work with them, but then I learned more about Crucible’s experimental methods. In addition to developing new products for startups and larger drink brands, it provides operational support to bars, restaurants, and hotels through fun brand engagement tactics.
Crucible has tried almost everything when it comes to brand experience. Most recently, they ran a Jägermeister cocktail competition with sessions exploring the sounds picked up from plants, and entrants could create their own ceramic vessels, using the lab equipment to create their drinks.
The combination of science and creativity results in “totally unpretentious artistry”, says Madalena Studio creative director Chris Collicott, adding that everything remains centred around “creating something enjoyable and fun as an end product” despite the “huge amounts of research and process”.
“A natural partnership”
Collicott reveals that he actually worked with Crucible founder Stuart Bale at a previous job, which they both left at similar times to pursue their own ventures. “It felt like a natural partnership for us to create the original brand identity for them from the start back in 2017, and we’ve collaborated on projects with them for various drinks brands, bars and restaurants over the years”, he says.
While the initial brief only included a website refresh, Collicott felt that Crucible also needed a new visual identity to reflect its evolution from being “the first bartender maker space […] to an award-winning innovation hub for the drinks industry”. The overarching goal was to create something impactful, visually reflecting Crucible’s fun and experimental approach to flavour.
Taking a risk
To represent the company’s unique ways of working, Madalena Studio wanted the brand to be visually engaging with impact and authenticity. Creating digital graphics didn’t seem to hit the mark, and they didn’t align with the physicality of Crucible’s own methods.
“Once we arrived at the idea of growing the logo from bacteria, it was an idea that just sat right”, says Collicott. “We didn’t know if it would work or how it would turn out, but for those reasons, it felt exactly the right way to go.”
Once the studio had confirmed this idea with the Crucible team, who felt the same way, they presented some originally grown bacteria tests, which had been manipulated as little as possible by humans. Achieving bright colours requires only a significant level of human interaction.
“We pushed and pulled the colours, inverting and maxing out the saturation”, says Collicott. When they arrived at the fluro pink and green combination, it was an obvious favourite as “Crucible have a bit of a thing for neon”, he adds.
To balance this out, the studio chose black and white as a backdrop to the visual language.
“From science project to graphic design project”
Collicott describes how some of the colours blocked together, resulting in “layers of almost 80s-90s-era patterns along with the natural organic textures”. Another interesting finding was that many of the samples changed colour over time, meaning the studio could apply one colour set to each sequence to amplify the natural colour change rather than creating it artificially.
“I felt this helped take the project from science project to graphic design project,” he says.
The logo’s shape uses the original graphic designed by Madalena Studio in 2017. To grow the bacteria in that specific shape, the design team pressed laser-cut cork logos swabbed with samples of aged kombucha, a liquid culture of lion’s mane, household food waste, and swabs from skin and soil solutions into Petri dishes.
This was all done in relatively lo-fi lab conditions and then left to grow in a makeshift incubator in Collicott’s basement.
According to Collicott, the initial tests of five samples worked surprisingly well, so the studio started to work on creating a time-lapse video to be used as the main visual for the website’s homepage. Shots of the samples were captured every few hours as the bacteria grew quite quickly in some cases.
The challenges of home-grown graphics
“The logistics of shooting 30-something samples at regular time intervals presented a few challenges,” says Collicott. “Each sample took 1-2 weeks to grow, so we had to do them in batches rather than one at a time, which meant manually taking off the Petri dish lids, moving the sample into position and shooting each frame individually.”
His close home’s close proximity to the studio made it a little easier to get home during the day to shoot, though Collicott admits that “getting up in the middle of the night for weeks was quite tiring after a while, and frankly, it all felt a bit over the top at times”.
It took “a bit of faith” to see the project through to the end”, he reveals.
A font inspired by collectable Czechoslovak chains
When creating the logo, a large number of frames were captured across a variety of samples, and, by the end, the studio had amassed a library of bacteria images. These were repurposed as part of the visual language, ranging from relatively C-shaped graphics with natural variations of form and texture to some completely unrecognisable patterns.
According to Collicott, the latter was perfect for use on the wider visual identity as backgrounds and other elements. He says, “The natural forms are all completely unique to Crucible, so it was nice that all of these elements feel authentic.”
Madalena Studio opted to use a combination of Klim’s sans-serif typeface Söhne and the rather abstract Plastic by Ivana Palečková and Jitka Janečková, a typeface reminiscent of collectable Czechoslovak chains. Collicott feels that “the contemporary look and feel from Söhne” works well with Plastic’s “fresh and playful take on the ‘science font’ typographic style”, resulting in exactly the right tone of voice for Crucible.
