Building a brand means building a world – that’s why Blanca Doba’s identity for Bare Earth didn’t stop at a wordmark

It was Blanca Doba’s love of film that first got her into design. Starting out just three years ago with a steady side hustle of designing movie and theatre posters for fun in her free time, the graphic designer took a completely self taught route into branding, becoming completely obsessed with type, visual systems and improving her technical skills along the way. “I had already been experimenting with Photoshop since I was young for HI5 profile pictures and Tumblr edits,” she says, “but in the last few years I have really had to level up my skills with Illustrator and InDesign.”

When the designer made the shift from posters to brand identities and landed her first few commissions she completely fell in love with the storytelling side of branding and the idea of “building a whole visual world around a single product or vision”, Blanca shares. So much so that she is still using her free time to flex this muscle, responding to Designer Briefs to pursue personal projects that give her complete creative freedom over the systems she builds and bring new and interesting ideas to her portfolio.

The result of one of these experiments was an identity for fictional beauty brand Bare Earth in response to a design brief for “a simple formula body care brand made with natural forest extracts.” Immediately connecting with the brand name and the challenge of building out its potential visual world, Blanca saw the project as an opportunity to break out of her usual “bold, colourful, Y2K art direction style”, and built a visual system that was full of whimsy, with soft, delicate tones, typography and decorative elements.

“For Bare Earth I wanted everything to feel gentle, like a pressed flower inside a book or a short poem written on a green leaf,” the designer says. Lace borders, floral photography and illustrations that look embroidered all made their way into the design system – but Blanca started with was typography. “I’d recently become really obsessed with ornate typography and Bare Project felt like the perfect project to explore this visually,” she says. “Anna Mills’ work with type was definitely a huge inspiration here for creating the brand signature.”

The logo started with calligraphic experimentation and hundreds of lettering studies that Blanca slowly narrowed down. “The primary version felt too decorative for a fully functioning identity system”, she says, “so I started simplifying and refining it in Illustrator while preserving the same emotional feeling for different applications.” Landing on something that wasn’t overly romantic or decorative but still had the feeling of an old bookplate or letter signature, the designer decided to pair the ornate logo mark with a much cleaner modern fonts (BN Cringe Sans and PP Mori) to bring the brand into the contemporary beauty space. The typography also heavily influenced the project’s color palette: “Softer neutrals, black and white, and muted green felt like the only colors that truly fitted the atmosphere I had created,” Blanca says.

The passion project’s resolve was a reminder of the importance of “stepping outside of your comfort zone creatively”, says Blanca. “I usually gravitate toward bold typography and strong contrast, so exploring a softer archival and tactile direction for Bare Earth felt unfamiliar but exciting.” Importantly, the designer gave herself complete freedom to create what she thought was best for the hypothetical brand, without worrying too much if it “fitted in with her existing portfolio” – “I think that freedom is exactly what made the final result feel cohesive,” she ends.