The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Hiut Denim Co. makes premium jeans in a family-run factory in Aberteifi, the Welsh coastal town also known as Cardigan. The place has a deep denim heritage: in the 1960s, its first jeans factory employed over 400 people and made over 35,000 pairs a week, until production moved offshore in 2002 and left decades of accumulated skill behind. Founded in 2011 to bring that skill home and train the next generation of makers, Hiut turned to Pentagram partner Hugh Miller for a new identity to help it tell that story.

“The old identity served us incredibly well. It helped establish who we were and gave us a voice when we were a young brand trying to prove that making jeans in a small Welsh town was still possible,” recalls Johann von Loeper, Chief Executive Officer. As the business matured, it became more about the art of making than the underdog story of reassembling a factory, and Miller’s brief was to refine Hiut into a more elevated, premium expression that caught up with it. What the team wanted was something quieter, “a clearer version of ourselves.” “Premium has never meant luxury in the traditional sense. Premium means depth,” von Loeper explains. They sought an identity “built on substance rather than decoration” in which the factory, the makers and Aberteifi remain the heroes.

At the centre of the identity is a redrawn wordmark. The original, set in a fairly neutral typeface beside the owl icon, gave Miller room to add character without losing its utilitarian feel. “Pattern-cutting shapes inspired the gutters and the junctions within the letterforms, giving the mark subtle personality – functional, but with more soul,” he details.

Beneath the wordmark, Pentagram set the word ‘Aberteifi,’ the Welsh name for Cardigan and the language spoken across the factory floor. “The Welsh language has been erased and painted over a lot, so placing the Welsh name of our town in the centre of the brand was a monumental moment for the whole team,” von Loeper reveals. The word is understated but deliberate, grounding the brand in its origins for anyone who recognises it and inviting curiosity from those who don’t.

The owl icon returns redrawn – bolder, rounder and more recognisable than before. It was already much-loved, which made the redesign a careful exercise. “The original owl read more hybrid alien or hawk than owl, with sharp eyes and a pointed nose,” Miller explains. The new version corrects the anatomy and keeps the beak within the circle, where the original broke it – a change shaped by applications such as buttons, and one that aligns the icon more closely with the wordmark. Its use has become more restrained too, reserved for premium touches like embossing or foil on swing tags. “Elusive, not everywhere, but sophisticated when present,” as Miller puts it, fittingly owl-like.

The primary typeface is Founders Grotesk, Klim Type Foundry’s workhorse grotesque, which represents the functional, utilitarian side of the brand. Against it sits ‘The Makers Font,’ a bespoke handwritten typeface drawn from the real signatures that the makers scribe into every pair of jeans before they leave the factory. “The Makers font speaks to the more personal, craft side of the brand,” Miller adds.

Turning those handwritten marks into a working typeface fell to Design Director Nigel Cottier. “We started by collecting extensive handwriting samples from all the makers and then isolated and curated characteristics across the set,” he explains, the results redrawn and composited into a single typeface. It has 15 stylistic sets and an array of contextual alternates that keep the variation and character of the makers’ hand alive across a run of text. “The font is a continuous work in progress, an ongoing refinement and additive process as we build in more character,” Cottier continues. For the most expressive uses, the Hiut team is encouraged to process actual hand script where it can, keeping the output authentic and spontaneous.

The colour palette draws on the muted hues of the surrounding landscape and the raw, functional character of the factory, translated through contrasting textures, materials and tones. “Our first visit to Cardigan captured the Welsh countryside and the town, but the factory had its own landscape too, with colour signifiers standing out amid the machinery,” Miller recalls, the rebrand elevating existing elements rather than replacing them. Like the owl, the palette is used with restraint, so it “surprises and lands with more impact when it appears.”

The art direction extends the world beyond type and colour. Hiut invited Jess Ellis to shoot the stills and Cat Garcia to capture the motion, photographing everyday moments from both the landscape and the factory floor in black and white and colour, attentive to texture and unexpected detail. “We’ve worked in this factory for years, and we’ve walked these streets thousands of times, but Jess and Cat showed us that there is extraordinary beauty in the ordinary,” von Loeper notes. The launch campaign and ongoing art direction are led by Hiut’s internal teams and collaborators, chosen for how their approach aligns with the brand, so Hiut can keep building a body of work that reflects its character and craft.