Oriel
A skincare identity that leads with the formula, not the claims.
01The problem
Oriel is a small-batch skincare brand built around seven botanical ingredients. It sells direct to customers who read labels before they read claims. Its founder came to the category from herbal pharmacy, not beauty marketing.
The category is crowded with two looks. Clinical white minimalism and soft pastel wellness both signal trust, and both are now so common they signal nothing. Oriel needed to feel credible to a sceptical buyer without wearing either uniform.
The design problem was specific. The identity had to work on a 30 ml amber bottle, an Instagram grid and a pharmacy shelf. It also had to hold up when the range grows from three products to twenty. We treated the bottle as the hardest brief and designed outward from it.
02The decision
We built the identity around one idea, the window. An oriel is a bay window that lets light into a room, and the brand’s promise is transparency about what goes on your skin.
That idea set three rules. Show the formula instead of decorating around it. Use an earthen palette that reads as plant-derived without leaves. Let typography carry the premium, not foil and finishes.
We rejected two other territories on the way. A botanical illustration route was beautiful but would have priced the brand into a gift market it doesn’t want. A purely typographic route felt cold next to the warmth of the product.
The result sits between apothecary and design studio. It looks considered on a shelf and honest up close.
03The mark, and why it holds
The mark is an arched window divided by a mullion and a transom. We drew it on a single 28-unit radius, so every curve in the wider system shares the same geometry.
Small sizes drove the details. The cut lines are thick enough to survive debossing on a 16 mm cap and rendering as a favicon. Below 14 pixels, the system switches to the wordmark alone.
The mark ships as a primary lockup, a stacked lockup and the standalone window. Clear space equals half the mark’s height on every side.
04The system behind it
The palette starts with Grove, a deep olive that reads as plant-derived without being green in the obvious sense. Clay and Petal come from the raw ingredients themselves, rosehip, red clay and calendula.
We paired an old-style serif with a humanist sans. The serif names products and carries headlines. The sans handles ingredient lists, where legibility at six point matters more than character.
Layouts sit on a six-column grid with generous margins. The window shape returns as a cropping device for photography, so the brand stays recognizable even when the mark is absent.
05Out in the world
Packaging leads with the formula. Each bottle lists its seven ingredients on the front panel, set large enough to read in a shop, and moves marketing language to the side.
Color codes each product line without a new hue for every product. Grove carries the core range, Clay marks treatments and Petal marks gift sets. The range can triple before the system strains.
Social templates reuse the window crop and a single serif headline. We designed them so the founder can produce a post in-house in under ten minutes, which is the realistic budget for a brand of this size.
06The rulebook we left behind
The guidelines run to 32 pages and cover the mark, color ratios, type hierarchy, photography and packaging templates. Every rule comes with its reason, so the team can make good calls in situations we didn’t foresee.