Elephant & Co. Rebrand
Branding, Emotion-led Design, Toy Box System Design
Elephant & Co. is a neighbourhood bar shaped by warmth, familiarity and a bit of chaos. I led the design for the 2025 rebrand as part of the team at Rare Ideas. The strategy team defined the brand’s role and behaviour; my focus was to translate that into a system that could hold its emotion, unpredictability and community-led nature. This article breaks down the thinking behind the system, a need for designing with emotion and a 'Toy Box System' approach that was used to build the brand. The brandbook at the end puts all of this into practice.
What Makes a Neighbourhood Bar Stick?
What is it about your favourite neighbourhood bar that becomes a part of your life, where it's almost second nature—a habit? Is it the comfort, the chaos, the fact that everyone knows you, or that someone already remembers your drink? It’s a mix of all of it.
Early on, I realised that rebranding a neighbourhood favourite needed sensitivity and an emotion-led approach. A place like this can’t be redesigned with rigid rules. It needed a system that didn’t take away from the feeling of the place, but held onto it. Something that kept space for familiarity, chaos, inconsistencies and community. Those became the foundation of the work.
Why Branding Alone Wouldn’t Work
Neighbourhood bars aren’t controlled brand environments. They shift every night. Different people handle the design, the communication and the small daily decisions that end up shaping tone. A rigid identity would have cracked instantly.
The system needed a steady core, but open edges. Something recognisable but not fragile. A framework that could stay consistent in feeling even when interpreted differently. Emotional design became the lens because the identity had to behave like the bar does—warm, slightly unhinged, and flexible enough to handle real-world messiness.
The Toy Box Approach
The Toy Box is the method we built around this idea. Instead of one perfect expression, we created a set of parts that define tone without forcing a single output. The structure holds the identity together. The flexibility lets the brand breathe.
The system invites participation. Anyone working with the brand, designers, staff, or collaborators can pick up the pieces, use them, and add their own twist. The identity stays stable because the logic is emotional and behavioural, not decorative.
Design Decisions
Once the system logic was clear, we translated it into form. Typography became the anchor—clean, technical and information-driven, grounding the identity in everyday function. Around that, we built space for personality. The illustrated characters appear from corners and “holes” like the people who inhabit the bar. HOE (Humans of ECO) became an IP that captures the bar’s human narratives. Popcorn received its own typographic voice because it has cultural weight inside the space. Colour behaves emotionally. Layouts stay functional but leave space for interruption.
The full brandbook below goes into each decision in detail: typography, illustrated characters, HOE, Popcorn, colour, layout, photography and more.
Refer to the brandbook below to understand the Toy Box System in full detail.
Credits:
Creative Direction, Design & Illustration: Omisha Gandhi, during my time at Rare Ideas
Brand Strategy: Strategy Team at Rare Ideas
Created for Elephant & Co.
View their full case study here.