SHIO’s identity for FMYAYA is made to grow alongside future collections — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

FMYAYA is a contemporary object company making collectable pieces that aim to bring playfulness into everyday life. Berlin-based creative studio SHIO created its identity as an evolving creative system that will grow alongside future collections, with room to shift in tone from one to the next while still looking cohesive. The remit ran from visual identity and packaging to editorial, motion, OOH, e-commerce and launch campaign.

“From the beginning, we knew we wanted to build an object brand rather than just launch a single product,” the FMYAYA team tells us. “What we didn’t know yet was what that brand should actually look and feel like.” SHIO led the creative direction, art direction and development of the visual system, with FMYAYA closely involved in the creative conversations throughout. FMYAYA chose bonsai as the theme for its first collection, inspired by the relationship that a bonsai can develop with the person who lives with it – asking for patience, attention and care, and offering something calming and restorative in return.

SHIO began the identity from a simple belief – objects deserve personalities. “We wanted the identity to feel playful and a little unexpected, a little weird, but also timeless enough that the objects could still take centre stage,” the FMYAYA team adds. Magazines and bold packaging are among the things that the studio collects. “We kept coming back to editorial publishing, record sleeves and printed ephemera from the 1980s and 1990s, not because we wanted to recreate that era, but because there was a graphic confidence to those references that still feels relevant today,” explains Piebee Hsu, Creative Director & Media Artist at SHIO. “They embraced variation without losing coherence, and that balance became an important reference point for us.”

“The bonsai already have such distinct personalities, so our role was to frame them, give them context and create a visual language that allowed each collection to develop its own character,” Irie Chow, Design & Art Director, details. Typography holds the identity together, pairing the discipline of Helvetica Neue with the warmth of Studio Feixen’s Ease. Helvetica Neue does most of the heavy lifting across editorial, packaging, digital and the more functional parts of the brand, and gives the photography, compositions and objects room to breathe. Ease appears selectively where the identity wants to speak a little louder, in expressive moments such as the oversized collection numbers and key display elements. “What drew us to Ease was its balance. It has enough personality to give the identity its own voice, but enough restraint that it never dominates the system,” Hsu notes.

Ease was also the starting point for the logo, whose two ‘A’s were merged and redrawn into a bespoke symbol. Across the system, typography appears oversized, cropped, repeated, layered and set into the imagery. With no fixed logo lock-up, the bold sans serif wordmark scales, rotates, crops and repeats depending on the composition and the format that it sits in. “Its proportions, typography and overall character always remain consistent,” Chow explains.

Recurring typographic gestures, graphic rhythm, colour relationships and compositional principles are what every application has in common. A motion library extends the system into campaigns, social media and future product launches, made mainly in TouchDesigner and After Effects, with the tool chosen for what each animation had to communicate. “We wanted to build a system that could evolve with the brand, adapt to future collections and remain recognisable through its behaviour rather than through repetition,” Hsu adds.

“Pairing bonsai with music felt like a pretty unusual idea, and we wanted to make sure it felt thoughtful rather than gimmicky,” the FMYAYA team explains. The pairing was FMYAYA’s idea, and the team even made the soundtracks themselves. “We approached the collection the way an independent record label approaches an artist,” Chow tells us. Every bonsai was given a debut album, with a fictional soundtrack, bespoke record sleeve, packaging and campaign, and SHIO built the visual worlds around each one. Ambient, Jazz Trio and City Pop became the three editions, each genre’s atmosphere translated into colour, photography, composition, texture and graphic rhythm.

Jazz Trio is the most graphic of the three – its layouts more layered, its compositions more compact and the interaction between typography and imagery more improvisational. Ambient moves the other way, with softer colours, generous negative space and close-cropped photography. The pacing is slower, giving each image more room. City Pop sits between them, with stronger colour contrast, cleaner compositions and more direct photography for a brighter, more immediate rhythm. “What interested us wasn’t making the collections look different for the sake of variety,” Hsu concludes. “It was seeing how far one identity system could stretch while remaining coherent.”