Tender Buttons

When we first met with the Tender Buttons hosts—the talented Jessica Andrews and Jack Young—the brief they set out was to take the existing blueprint of their current logo as a starting point, feeling that the grapefruit/blood orange motif still felt “playful and fresh and captures the fleshiness of the kind of literature we’re interested in—radical writing that engages with the body and politics in a materialist way”. However, it was perhaps a little pithy in its current form, and they were very keen on our suggestion to develop something cleaner, with an additional stratum of visual playfulness.

Our final design retained the rough form of the bisected fruit—in particular that certain fleshiness!—but transformed it into something more graphical, even geometric. We proposed the idea of including a button-like form as part of the logo, and our design utilises these crisp, dissecting lines in tandem with the more illustrative and stylistically grain-heavy segments and skin of the fruit. The colour palette too continued the overarching fleshy thematic—attempting to communicate rawness, meaty subjects and also the notion of the body in a political / gender-political context. Yet, despite those overtones, we wanted the palette to also feel soft, calm and inviting.

The full logo also needed to include the podcast’s name—in contrast to the original image-only iteration—and so in consultation with Jessica and Jack we settled on Blackest from our four-font shortlist, an ‘inverse contrast wedge serif’ that they both fell in love with. Alongside this, the final part of the brief was the creation of a social media card template that could be utilised for each new episode. Our design, with its clean white linear forms linking to that on the logo, also added two new typefaces to the new Tender Buttons’ visual cannon: the literary indulgence of Argent and the friendly but utilitarian CoFo Sans.