Abmo designed the entire Belle & George identity by hand, by choice

The Brand Identity: Belle & George is a ‘Maison de Design,’ founded by Isabelle and George Castaing-Soulier, a Franco-Austrian couple who met in Vienna, left, returned and then built a family there. The brand pairs in-house collections of furniture and objects with a selection from European artisans who share its values of craftsmanship, durability and transparency.

Paris and Bordeaux-based studio Abmo took on the full identity design, working from a promise the founders had set as their compass: la beauté du vrai, the beauty of the true. Abmo began the project in Vienna, spending two days walking the city with the Castaing-Souliers and stepping into their aesthetic world. “We were closely aligned: the same wish to surround ourselves, at home and in daily life, only with objects that move us each time our eyes land on them,” explains Sonia Cordier, Co-Founder & Strategy Director at Abmo.

The ‘la beauté du vrai’ phrase came to her in French just after those two days, a deliberate choice to affirm the French side of the couple. It set a condition that ran past the brand and into the studio’s own methods. Everything that could be made by hand was made by hand, so that the way the identity was built became a continuation of what the brand promises its customers. That promise carried weight because it answered a conviction Creative Director Dez Gusta had held for a long time. “My relationship to objects is shaped by William Morris and the Bauhaus.

I think an object is only beautiful when it carries the trace of the person who made it, or failing that, the trace of time and use: in short, a history,” he tells us. “An industrially made object is, to me, a dead object.” The Belle & George founders had arrived at the same place from a different direction, one stepping back from architecture and interior design to design a collection, the other bringing a decade spent on circular economy models in the energy and food industries.

They had agreed on simple promises they could keep, and those promises became the spine the rest of the project hung from. The wordmark is where two design traditions meet in a single set of letters. Gusta drew it by hand, pulling on Viennese Jugendstil, the ornamental, organic style that flourished in Vienna around 1900, and setting it against the more measured elegance of Parisian Art Deco. But he is wary of either reference reading too plainly. “There is a line of Godard’s I have always worked by, that what matters is not where you take things from but where you take them to,” he tells us.

“Take an element, pull it out of its context, carry it somewhere it is not used to being. And blur the tracks a little.” The ‘ambigram’ works that same tension into a tighter constraint. This kind of mark, one that reads the same from more than one orientation, holds a 180-degree rotational symmetry that Gusta arrived at through intuition before he understood what it was answering. “A ‘b’ and a ‘g,’ two letters that resemble each other in a mirror, like the two founders of Belle & George,” he explains.

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The article discusses a unique approach to brand identity design that emphasizes craftsmanship, which is significant for the industry, but the concept of hand-made design is not entirely new, making it moderately novel and highly relevant to brand strategy professionals.