03 · Brand Identity

Halden

An identity and digital experience for a home fragrance and objects brand, built on a single architectural idea.

Industry: Consumer / Home & Lifestyle
Deliverables: Identity, packaging
Ecommerce website
Services: Brand Strategy, Visual Identity, Packaging, Art Direction, Digital Design

The Halden family, an outer box, three frosted room sprays, a blue candle and an incense box, standing in a pool of light against a board-marked concrete wall; a thin orange line crosses every object at the same height

Five scents, three formats, one line. Every Halden object carries the same line, 40 mm above its base, so the family lines up wherever it stands.

01 · The opportunity

Home fragrance sells a mood. Nobody sells the room.

The category speaks in soft focus: candles named after feelings, labels that could belong to anyone, the same beige still life on every shelf. Halden is for people who notice rooms, and who would rather know what something is made of than be told how it should make them feel.

Positioning
Specified, not styled.
Fragrance and objects described the way an architect describes a room: material, proportion and use.
Audience
People who furnish slowly.
Design-literate homes, small studios and hotel rooms that are meant to be lived in, not staged.
Voice
Plain and exact.
Every name is one word. Everything else is a specification: notes, room size, burn time, refill.
Difference
Objects that line up.
Put any two Halden objects side by side and their lines meet. The brand is visible in the arrangement.

02 · The brand idea

The datum.

In architecture, a datum is the reference line everything else is organised around. A room feels quiet when its parts agree with each other. Halden makes that line its signature: one line, one-third up, on everything it makes.

On objects
40 mm above the base, whatever the height.
In type
The wordmark and every product name rest on it.
In photographs
A horizon, ledge or sill one-third up.
On screen
One line per view, shared by page and product.

Five frosted Halden room sprays with blue caps on a plaster ledge, named Still, Low, North, Even and Dry, their orange lines at one height

Collection 01: five rooms. One word per scent, a number, three notes. The line holds them together on the shelf.

03 · Identity system

A wordmark that rests on a line.

The wordmark is set wide and sits on its own datum, which runs on to the edge of whatever carries it: a label, a box, a browser. Where it cannot fit, the monogram stands in: an H whose crossbar sits low, on the line.

Typography sheet: Archivo Expanded for display, Archivo for text and IBM Plex Mono for specifications — **Three voices.** A wide display face for names, a plain text face for reading, a mono for anything you would check.

Colour sheet: Limewash, Halden Blue, Graphite, Plaster and a narrow band of Ember, shown in proportion, with five muted scent tones — **Colour, in proportion.** Halden Blue for objects, Limewash for paper, and Ember for the line and nothing else.

04 · Packaging

Every object carries the line at 40 mm.

Room spray, candle and incense differ in height, but not in where the line sits. Any combination on a shelf reads as one composition, and new formats inherit the rule rather than a new layout.

Packaging architecture sheet: outer box, room spray, candle and incense box drawn in elevation with dimensions in millimetres, a shared datum at 40 mm and a common base line — **Drawn to scale.** Heavy acid-etched glass, a matte blue cap, glazed ceramic and uncoated board: stock formats, specified so they could be made.

One label, five scents. Name on the line, specification below it. The only thing that changes is a word, a number and a small swatch.

05 · Art direction

Photographs hold the same horizon.

Architectural light and material close-ups, never lifestyle. Each frame is cropped so a floor line, ledge or edge falls one-third up, so the brand's photography lines up the way its objects do.

Art direction board: five tall photographs of light in a white room, grey stone, weathered cedar, linen and incense smoke, with a single orange line crossing all five one-third up — **Light, stone, cedar, linen, smoke.** The materials behind the five scents, in one grade, on one line.

06 · Digital

The site keeps the line too.

Every view has one datum. On the product page, the bottle's line and the page's line are the same line, with the product's name resting on it. The website is the packaging, at screen scale.

The Halden homepage on desktop and phone: the headline Objects for a quieter space rests on an orange line that continues into a photograph of a quiet white room — **Home.** The headline rests on the datum; the photograph's floor meets the same line.

The Halden product page for 01 Still: the room spray on the left, and an orange line running across the page through the bottle's label and under the product name — **Product.** One line runs through the bottle and under the name. Price, format and specification sit below it, where the label puts them.

Three phone screens: the Halden homepage, the Still product page and the collection, where each row of products shares one orange line — **Mobile.** In the collection grid, each row of products shares a line, the way they would on a shelf.

07 · The system

One rule, every touchpoint.

The identity is a rule anyone can apply, not a set of finished artworks. Insert card, mailer, social post, retail fixture, seal and card all follow it, and none needed a new idea.

System board with six touchpoints: an A6 insert card, a blue mailer box, a square social post, a retail fixture elevation where every shelf shares one line, a blue seal and a business card

08 · What the system enables

A brand you can recognise by a single line.

And a system simple enough to grow without losing it.

Recognisable at a distance.
The line reads across a room before the name does.
Grows by rule.
A new format inherits the 40 mm line; a new scent gets a number and a word.
One language, box to browser.
Packaging, print and the website share type, colour and the datum.
Built to be specified.
Mono specifications make every product as legible to a buyer as to a customer.