How to strike a balance between sophisticated, playful and natural in food branding, with Fed & Watered

For some, a job in design is all about striving for the next big client, but for the studio Fed & Watered there’s a certain beauty in keeping things small. In their five years of practice, its founders Oliver Hilliker and Orlando Lloyd have found working with smaller independent businesses not only allows them to get stuck into the “nitty gritty” aspects of design, but to also have a closer relationship with the craft of the projects they work on. Recent projects have seen the pair personally foraging for kombucha ingredients, and visiting the Outer Hebrides to learn firsthand about whisky production.

In terms of style, Oliver tells us that the studio aims to “strike a balance between sophisticated, playful and natural”, often prioritising a typographic approach, enhanced with illustration or photography. “Our process is really about distilling a brand voice down to its purest form with a fresh modern tone,” Oliver says. This general approach comes across perfectly in their work for Matka Ferments. For their bottle labels, a sleek yet disconnected type with spiky serifs is combined with buoyant illustrations of the fermentation process, pops of colour enlivening the off-white base colour.

Being based in Scotland (Oliver in Edinburgh and Orlando in Glasgow) the studio regularly works with Scottish businesses, embracing the traditional visual vernacular of the country, while tapping into its rich creative network. For a recent rebrand of Gandfoli, a family restaurant based in Glasgow opened in 1979, the pair explored Scotland’s legacy of sign painting, injecting the restaurant with a sense of “reverence”. They enlisted the talents of sign painter Erin Bradley Scott, to restore and recreate the original hand-painted lettering signage into custom typography, which was then used across both the brand and shopfront.

As a two-person studio, collaboration is a key part of Fed & Watered’s approach. But not only is working with so many other creatives a logistical step for the studio, it’s one that they believe brings great variation and energy to their work. Alongside sign painter Erin, for the Matka Ferments brand the illustrations of the fermentation process were brought to life by the designer and illustrator Stewart Armstrong. Other recent projects have seen them work with the illustrator Jack Fletcher, who lent his work to their project with Wild Wine, visualising unique production methods of the beverage, and the artist Nick Dahlen on their MacMillan spirits, whose label artworks captured the “essence” of each of the distiller’s spirits.

Ollie and Orlando hope that their work doesn’t only make memorable businesses, but also highlights how impressive Scotland’s culinary landscape is. “Scotland is a great place for independent hospitality businesses, and we think it’s super important that we all support and use our independents, or we lose them,” Oliver says. It appears they themselves have crafted the perfect recipe for studio success, paying attention to craft, keeping things small, and collaborating with some of the best homegrown talent. Clearly, Fed & Watered proves that bigger doesn’t always mean better.