Pan After is a Melbourne store stocking ethically produced, environmentally conscious products sourced from around the globe.
I started working with Phoebe and her mother Mandy about 5 years ago. At the time they had two stores, Pan After and After Store in the the old vaults at the Queen Victoria Market. In 2019 they opened a new space at a warehouse in Collingwood, consolidating the two businesses as Pan After which created an opportunity to realign the brand and visual direction to suit the new space.
I wanted to create a sense of journey within the Pan After brand, by placing emphasis on space and arrangement. When you visit the store, you might find a deluxe Tekla towel from Copenhagen, next to a scrubbing brush from Mexico, next to a giant lobster made from a traffic cone in Cape Town. I wanted the typography to follow a similar journey, treating words like items on a shelf, oddly spaced to create this disjointed harmony.
The brand has two wordmarks, which expand and collapse in application. The primary mark is set in Toy, a wonderful gothic typeface by Philipp Herrmann (Out of the Dark). The secondary wordmark, along with body copy is set in Maria, an odd grotesque / geometric typeface designed by Phil Baber. These opposing typefaces in combination with odd spacing, odd colour and odd pattern come together to make a really nice, loose brand, existing within this flexible framework that can easily adapt to each new format.
Maria is super robust, with this underlying irregularity that aligned perfectly with my thoughts for the brand. I had an of how Toy worked from the way it was presented online, however when I started playing with this, looking at alternative letters and so forth, I found a nice calm energy for the wordmark. Again, like the products in store, many of which are hand made, I wanted both typefaces to feel a little wonky and unexpected together, and in isolation.
I’m always scouring the internet for trials and funky free fonts. High brow, low brow, in-between brow, I love it all. I store things away for a rainy day, so when it comes to working on a new brief, quite often I have an instinct for what I want to do, and things flow pretty freely from there. One of the first things a friend taught me when I started working was to bend and stretch and put fonts on angles, so over time I have developed this inherent sense for breaking things to create a new narrative.
I mostly work solo, building teams around specific projects, depending on whats on the table. Before I started this brand, Alice Oehr had created some patterns for bowls and wrapping paper with Phoebe which complimented the brand direction, and informed some of the colour theory. Once the brand was complete, I worked with photographer Josh Robenstone on documenting the project. Aside from this, I am in the process of partnering with my long time collaborator Rick Milovanovic on an exciting new project which we are launching soon — stay tuned.
