The creative industry witnessed a remarkable array of innovative projects in September, showcasing everything from illustrated travel journals to experimental festival branding. These standout works demonstrate the diverse landscape of contemporary design, spanning commercial ventures, cultural expressions, and deeply personal artistic journeys that caught the attention of creative professionals worldwide.
Among the month's most notable projects was "Drawn Across Europe" by Berlin-based graphic designer and illustrator Falko Grentrup. What began as a family rail trip through Europe transformed into an illustrated travel diary that merged photography with hand-drawn illustrations. Starting from Stockholm and traveling south toward the Croatian coast, Grentrup documented stops in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Trieste, Rijeka, and Rab, creating playful vignettes where characters seemed to come alive within urban landscapes.
Grentrup's hybrid approach blended his photographs with hand-rendered drawings, giving the series both sketchbook intimacy and polished storytelling quality. Each city took on a distinct character through architectural details and surreal juxtapositions of figures and places. "It's a playful way of documenting the trip," Grentrup explained, and that joy is evident in the lightness of the characters and their seamless integration into urban backdrops. The project serves as a reminder that travel isn't merely about checking destinations off a list, but about capturing the small impressions and stories that linger long after returning home.
In the realm of wine branding, Goodside's work for DirtyVine found fresh middle ground between traditional dusty heritage and self-conscious minimalism. DirtyVine positions itself as a community for those who value simple ingredients and sustainable farming practices. Goodside developed the brand comprehensively, handling strategy, identity, packaging, and website design to create something that feels rebellious yet accessible to consumers.
The brand centers around the concept of "Bottled Sunshine," which manifests through vibrant colors, loose and imperfect illustrations, and a tone of voice that replaces pretension with quick wit. The typography feels relaxed, while Jessica Hische's hand-drawn wordmark anchors the entire identity in craft tradition. Even the packaging embraces unpolished joy, making the unboxing experience part of the brand's playful ritual. The collaboration with Baggy Studio on the digital side extends this philosophy, creating a website that flows as naturally as a conversation over wine.
Designer Morgan Hastie, known as The Logo Lassie, drew inspiration directly from Mexico's ancient past for his work on Calénton Hot Sauce branding. The packaging design incorporates carvings, ruins, and bold symbology that Hastie encountered during his travels earlier in the year. These cultural references shaped both the illustration style and typographic choices, creating an identity that feels deeply connected to heritage while maintaining a contemporary appearance.
The bottles feature sleek, minimal design, but die-cut labels and a high-contrast color palette push them into more experimental territory. Neon greens and fiery reds contrast against graphic black details, achieving a balance between tradition and modernity that appeals to younger audiences. Hastie noted that the project focused on "experimenting to bring those little elements of traditional art style into the modern design layout." In a category often crowded with cartoon chillies and flames, Calénton feels both sophisticated and playful, celebrating heritage without freezing it in time.
Addressing the frustrating experience of endless e-commerce scrolling, Hey Savi emerged as a new fashion search engine designed to make product discovery as intuitive as music recognition apps. Built on AI-powered image recognition technology, the platform offers seamless, brand-agnostic recommendations tailored to users' actual preferences. YeahNice handled the visual identity and launch campaign, creating something fresh yet accessible.
The brand identity centers on the user experience, featuring a conversational system rooted in a distinctive speech bubble device. This motif appears across digital and campaign assets, grounding the AI-powered technology in something human and familiar. The team also produced an engaging promotional film that walks users through the product in four simple steps: "Snap. Search. Buy. Wear.," demonstrating how quickly inspiration can translate into reality. The understated approach avoids over-explanation, instead feeling useful, elegant, and refreshingly humble for a tech product.
New York-based designer Ipshita Krishan reimagined festival branding with The Sunburn Project, a self-initiated rebrand of India's Sunburn Festival. Krishan explored what an EDM festival identity looks like when stripped back to its origins, finding inspiration in the very thing that gave Asia's largest dance event its name: the heat of bodies in motion. She used literal sunburn marks as visual cues, translating them into graphic gradients and textures.
Combined with a palette of infrared-inspired reds and oranges, the visuals radiate warmth and intensity, echoing the thermal glow of packed crowds. Typography grounds the identity in gothic serif forms, deliberately contrasting with the sleek modernist styles typically seen in music branding. Elongated serifs, tight kerning, and alternate characters inject movement into letterforms, giving even static words the pulse of a bassline. Though conceptual, the project demonstrates how cultural history and visual experimentation can merge effectively.
These five projects collectively represent the breadth of contemporary creativity, showing how designers are pushing boundaries across commercial, cultural, and personal work. From Grentrup's intimate travel documentation to Krishan's visceral festival rebranding, each project offers unique insights into current design thinking. They demonstrate that the most compelling creative work often emerges when designers take risks, set their own briefs, and explore beyond traditional client expectations, ultimately reshaping how we experience everything from wine to travel to music festivals.
