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Wunder Werkz brands Close Company, Death & Co’s neighbourhood bar
The branding strategy for Close Company emphasizes a warm, approachable identity that contrasts with the more formal atmosphere of its predecessor, Death & Co. By leveraging a custom iconographic language and a design system that feels both familiar and contemporary, the brand aims to create a neighborhood bar experience that fosters connection and community while maintaining a high level of craftsmanship in its offerings.
The Brand Identity: Death & Co redefined American cocktail culture through precision and ritual. Their bars became temples of technique, places where drinks arrived with the gravity of ceremony and the meticulous craft of watchmaking.
Close Company represents the group’s deliberate pivot towards something looser: a concept designed for gathering rather than reverence, opening across Nashville, Atlanta and Las Vegas with the technical mastery Death & Co built its reputation on, wrapped in the warmth of a neighbourhood dive. Denver-based design studio Wunder Werkz developed the brand direction and visual system, drawing from an era when bars lived through local lore and word of mouth.
The reference points span old Yellow Pages advertisements, vintage matchbooks and blues posters – pre-digital vernacular design that communicated fast, demanded to be remembered, and lived in the real world rather than on screens. At the centre of the identity sits a custom-built Wingding typeface – an entire iconographic language designed specifically for Close Company. These aren’t emojis but something older and more tactile: icons that feel worn, familiar and lived-in before anyone’s touched them.
The glyph set balances symbols that read as informative and directional like arrows, phones and mailboxes – with icons specific to Close Company’s world: think drinks, music and late nights. “A lot of the glyphs are rooted in connection,” explains Jon Hartman, Partner at Wunder Werkz. “The rest of the set speaks more directly to the offering and good times with friends. If a symbol didn’t further that story, it didn’t make the cut.” The development process generated options that ultimately fell away.
Early explorations produced glyphs that felt too modern, too clean, or insufficiently tactile – marks that wouldn’t function as useful tools for the Close Company team in daily applications. The icons that survived share a quality that’s difficult to articulate but immediately recognisable: they feel like they’ve existed longer than they have. The primary graphic mark captures a bartender’s handshake – a greeting that regulars receive when they slide onto a familiar stool. Wunder Werkz explored different territories during development, testing fully figurative handshakes and wildly abstract gestures that prioritised feeling over form.
The process clarified that the mark needed to feel timeless and approachable with undertones of Americana, instantly recognisable before any playfulness registered. Rather than forcing one definitive solution, the studio developed a small family of marks that provide variety without fragmenting the system. “Where we ultimately landed is a gesture translated into geometry,” Hartman shares, “simple enough to function as pure form, but still emotionally legible.” The challenge of designing a dive bar aesthetic backed by one of the world’s most technically rigorous hospitality groups required navigating genuine tension.
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The rebranding of a notable bar contributes to the design industry by showcasing a shift in branding strategy, but it is not groundbreaking in the context of the broader market.