DesignStudio unveils new identity for co-living brand The Collective

DesignStudio, the agency behind the brand identities of businesses like Deliveroo and Airbnb, has delivered a complete rebrand for The Collective, one of the world’s first “co-living” companies. “Co-living” is a form of urban housing combining thoughtfully designed private spaces with communal amenities and living spaces.

The Collective and DesignStudio worked together to create the new identity, which comprises of a new logo, wordmark, dynamic type family, full website relaunch, merchandise and key artwork for posters and mobile backgrounds.

The team at DesignStudio put in the yards to capture the spirit of the company and the idea behind co-living. “To kickstart our process, we researched utopian living ideas from the architectural past, created a personalised Instagram walking tour of the Barbican and slept at The Collective Old Oak to experience it first-hand,” says Campbell Butler, creative director at DesignStudio. “We created scents, blankets, playlists, reading lists and prototype rooms at DesignStudio packed full of plants and objects to keep us in the mindset of The Collective throughout our identity development.”

As a result, the agency’s key design philosophy centres around the idea that “two’s company, three’s a collective”, according to Campbell. “It’s an approach that combines different forms, textures and colours to represent the diverse characters and personalities that live and work [in The Collective]. The logo itself is warm and welcoming, combining three ergonomic shapes arranged into a composition that becomes more than the sum of its parts.”

The Collective’s central idea is “Be More Together”. To bring this to life, DesignStudio partnered with type foundry Colophon to add dynamism to the designs. Every character in the typeface is programmed to behave differently in different situations – a metaphor for how people can change as a result of their environment or the people they live with. The team also worked with the illustrators Karolin Schnoor, Franziska Barczyk and Jake Williams to add extra colour to the identity.

Founded in 2010, The Collective has since grown from offering small house shares to owning and operating the world’s largest co-living community. Today it owns and runs the world’s biggest co-living buildings, The Collective Old Oak and The Collective Canary Wharf, both in London. The 150-strong team is based across New York, London and Berlin and has raised more than $800 million to fund its growth across the US, UK and continental Europe. So it’s likely we’ll all be seeing this new identity a lot more over the coming years.