It's a little embarrassing, to be honest. I've spent more time this week than is healthy staring at a new logo for the fashion label Huit. Not the full identity, not the gorgeous landscape photography, not even the lovely barn owl mark. Just the wordmark. Four letters set in a chunky, beautifully weighted grotesque, with a small secondary line reading "ABERTEIFI" beneath it in widely-tracked caps.
That's it. That's the whole thing. And yet here I am, still thinking about it a week after first seeing it; turning it over in my mind like a loose stone in my pocket.
This is, I accept, slightly unhinged. But I also think unpacking it might tell us something useful about what good brand design actually is (for more examples, see our best logos post).
Listen before logo-ing
The commission came when Hiut – the Welsh denim label founded in Aberteifi in 2011 with a mission to revive the town's jeans-making heritage – decided to evolve its identity. Pentagram partner Hugh Miller took on the project, and what his process feels almost unfashionable in its patience. "The best identities aren't invented," he says. "They're uncovered. They already exist in the habits, beliefs, and behaviours of a company. The role of design is to notice them, clarify them, and give them a more coherent expression."
Before doing anything, then, the team spent real time with Hiut in Cardigan: walking the factory floor, talking to the makers, absorbing the particular character of the place. That kind of rigour tends to show up in the work, even if you can't point to exactly where. Here, I think it's reflected in the wordmark's sense of earned confidence: its refusal to be flashy, the way it feels like it was always going to look like that.
So here's my best attempt at explaining my crush. The HIUT wordmark works because of its proportions, its weight, and its utter lack of cleverness. It's blunt without being crude, functional without being cold. It reads, in some hard-to-articulate way, like something a skilled person made.
The addition of ABERTEIFI tips it from good into something more. It grounds the brand in its Welsh location and heritage, adds compositional structure, and signals that this brand isn't embarrassed about where it comes from. Using the Welsh name rather than the English "Cardigan" isn't a marketing decision; it's a values call.
What does "good" look like?
The wider system is also excellent: a redrawn owl mark that will still be charming in 30 years; a typography pairing of utilitarian Founders Grotesk with The Makers Font, an expressive handwritten typeface drawn from the actual signatures factory workers write into every pair of jeans before they leave the building. That detail is so good it almost feels like cheating.
But what I keep coming back to is the wordmark. Most rebrands are exercises in aspiration: the brand you want to be, the customers you'd like to attract. Hiut's is, in contrast, an exercise in clarity: the brand you actually are, expressed as well as it can possibly be.
As Miller puts it, "The strongest brands don't stand still. They grow. They accumulate stories. They become richer through use. In many ways, that's what a great pair of jeans does too. It carries the marks of where it's been. This identity is designed to do the same."
Four letters. A Welsh place name. An owl. In a word, perfection.
The Brand Impact Awards 2026 are now open for entries! If you have a standout branding project from the last year that you think deserves recognition, you need to enter the BIAs. You have until July 9 to enter and you can do so on the Brand Impact Awards website.
