Children’s toys don’t need to be an eyesore with Odd Works’ tasteful identity for Toyto

Odd Works, a multidisciplinary design and art studio based between Lisbon and London, run by artist, art director and designer Pavel Ripley and creative producer Alina Golubeva, works with clients and collaborators worldwide, providing creative and art direction across visual identity, digital design, print, books, packaging, motion and video work. With Toyto, the Berlin-based brand of open-ended wooden toys, the studio makes its first foray into toys.

The mission is clear with the Toyto brand: move away from the blue light of digital screens to the accessible, recognisable tones of wooden toys. The brand is invented by artists, rooted in humane pedagogy and handmade by carpenters in Eastern Europe, its blocks, cubes, rainbows, towers and vehicles come with no batteries and no instructions, leaving children free to decide what each object becomes, and away from the dopamine drip feed that TikToks and YouTube.

If you veer toward these sorts of toys, but feel a little old-fashioned, you’re not alone. The brand itself is rooted in the good old fashioned 20th-century, particularly inspired by Bauhaus designers Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, Charles and Ray Eames, Kurt Naef and Enzo Mari. “Instead of the artificial visual language of current children’s brands, we looked to grown-up design: the Swiss Style, postwar European industrial design, Braun and Dieter Rams. Playfulness still had to be there, and it comes from two devices: the illustrations and the typeface,” says Pavel, who led art direction and provided illustrations on the project.

The studio drew a custom Toyto wordmark, its letters built from shapes that echo the very wooden toy products – and the team paired it with Labil Grotesk by Kometa Typeface (the same one we use across this very website!) “Labil is a precise, geometric grotesque, which suits the mature side of the brand. But its ‘labile’ stylistic sets make letters lean and tilt in an almost random order, like a tower of blocks about to tip over,” says Alina, who led design on Toyto. “With a ready-made typeface and minimal means, we got exactly the balance we wanted: grown-up and playful at once.”

The packaging is attractive to the modern parent – it’s clean, calming, uncluttered – there is no barrage of hyper-stimulant imagery here vying for your kid’s entire attention span. As well as that, it’s a box you can confidently pop on the shelf next to chunky photography books and slim volumes, after all, there’s no need for kid’s toys to be an eyesore (that’s how they so often end up shoved under a bed or thrown in the attic to never resurface). The best thing about Toyto is that any age is invited to play – despite many children’s toys or video games boasting an ‘all-ages’ label, often the true issue is one of generational divide, but here these products are truly timeless.

Toyto’s goal is to encourage freedom, tactility and imagination. In that order, Odd Works wasted no time inviting freedom through minimal layouts and airy typography, tactility through packaging that utilises embossing, debossing and a palette of complex colours and imagination through letters that act as construction parts that assemble. Everything about Toyto is a little “crooked”, but it feels real, touchable, inviting. “One line from the identity sums it up: ‘toy’ for parents, ‘to’ play with kids,” ends Pavel.