Great identity by Universal Everything for new Google e-publishing venture

A good identity conveys a complex idea in simple, beautiful ways; and boy, is Universal Everything’s branding for Editions At Play a good identity. The agency was tasked with creating the look and feel for Editions at Play by Google’s Creative Lab, which needed a clean, simple look and feel for the new digital publishing platform. The idea of Editions At Play is to create a space and publisher for “books that cannot be printed and immersive literature,” according to Universal Everything; so they distilled this complex notion into minimal typographic components that manage to marry playfulness and simplicity with the challenges of working in a new, challenging digital space. “The identity is inspired by books on a shelf and binary code. Bringing the two elements together, the brand mark can develop and grow with different authors’ approaches to the Editions At Play publications,” says the agency.

The publisher is a joint venture between Visual Editions and Google’s Creative Lab, with the latter brand’s Play Books offshoot distributing the titles it houses. “In our minds, rather than trying to work within the usual e-book constraints, which plenty of people and places already do, Editions At Play will have a URL that transports readers to a digital location or even into the real world (well why not?), or chase you across the internet,” says Visual Editions. “We imagine digital literature that has no beginning or no end, or landscapes that can travel in any direction or have any number of characters, plots, side plots and inventions. We like the idea of books that mutate or disappear, that change depending on readers’ circumstance or location, or books that let you uncover material through different kinds of challenges.”