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SC Ostrea is the first typeface released by Hamburg-based Studio Chapeaux, a bold, characterful display typeface built specifically for packaging, and rather than showcase it on a specimen sheet, the studio put it straight to work on Broken Oyster Club, an in-house brand created to prove what it can do. “It has the same rough edges and corners oysters have in nature,” Nils R. Zimmermann, Founder & Creative Director, explains. “Irregular. Unpredictable.”
As product categories multiply and shelves grow more crowded, Studio Chapeaux sees the fight for attention at the point of sale settling on one thing. “Type accounts for 60% of how a bold commercial package is perceived – that’s not up for debate,” Zimmermann notes, the studio treating type not as a supporting layer behind an illustration or a photograph but as the primary decision maker. Heavier, chunkier letterforms are, by the studio’s reckoning, functionally superior, holding up under glare, distance and the compression of print where thin type collapses – which is why they are steadily replacing logos and illustration as the primary signal on the shelf.
“It has to hold its own from a shelf’s distance, survive the compression of print onto a curved can or a tight label, and still carry personality at two centimetres high,” Zimmermann details. It also has to accommodate the weights, measurements, ingredients and legal copy every product must carry, without any of it looking like an afterthought; the typeface has to be a symbiosis with the product. SC Ostrea is the studio’s demonstration of that, which Zimmermann calls “our amuse-bouche from the kitchen: what happens when a typeface is built to fit a product perfectly.” The name is just as literal, taken from the European flat oyster, Ostrea edulis. “We wanted the name to work exactly like the typeface does,” he adds, “rooted literally in the animal, not bolted on as a metaphor afterwards.”
Born from the studio’s love of food and the sea, Broken Oyster Club pairs oysters with canned beer, refined for luxury food culture and playful enough for a can on a bar counter. “Oysters are usually paired with a classic serif – that’s exactly what we didn’t want,” Zimmermann tells us. “We wanted to prove the opposite: that a distinctive, courageous typographic solution generates far more resonance.” The brand came first, and standard typographic solutions would not get the studio where it wanted to go. “We started designing type ourselves – first for the wordmark, then for the product names,” he recalls, “and from there the whole typeface grew,” along with the realisation that the studio had found a genuine gap in the market.
SC Ostrea is the first sign of a foundry Studio Chapeaux is building around packaging. Most typefaces are optimised for every touchpoint, print and web especially, while a product has to tell its story in far fewer moments and still create resonance. “That takes character, impact from a distance and style to hold your own,” Zimmermann reveals, “and that’s precisely what’s missing from most type libraries today.” A second typeface is broader in scope and less of a teaser, in his words, “a mix of serif and display banger, built to carry a full identity rather than announce one.”