Every baby grows up in their own way. Lovevery is a new line of educational play products and baby toys for stage-based learning, designed to engage babies at every phase of their development and offered in monthly subscription boxes sent to your home, using eco-friendly packaging. Pentagram helped create the look and feel of the line, including its brand identity, naming, packaging, website, brand platform, messaging (with Jeremy Faro) and art direction, and collaborated on the product design with product designer Seth Murray. The branding is warm, modern and engaging, and helps make the arrival of each Play Kit feel exciting and personal.
The Pentagram team worked closely on the project with Lovevery co-founders Jessica Rolph and Roderick Morris. No two babies or parenting styles are the same, and Rolph and Morris, both parents of young children themselves, wanted to introduce a new kind of baby product line that felt less prescriptive about how a child should develop, but still backing all their products with proven science, allowing parents to feel less stressed about what toys they provide for their kids. Lovevery carefully designs baby toys with the help of experts, using high-quality materials like natural wood, cotton, and soy plastics. These are delivered in kits as your baby grows, so they always have developmentally appropriate toys to play with and learn from. Time Magazine named the Play Kits one of the Best Inventions of 2018, and the Play Gym collected numerous accolades in 2018 including the Red Dot Design Award. After a highly successful first year, Lovevery recently launched its Year 2 series for toddlers, with more products on the horizon.
The Lovevery name, developed by Pentagram, doubles as an infinitely expandable platform for the brand messaging―“Lovevery baby,” “Lovevery child,” “Lovevery moment,” “Lovevery playtime.” The Lovevery logo bends and wiggles in different ways in reference to the paths we all take as we grow up. Child development is not “one size fits all”, so the flexible wordmark takes different shapes based on its container, adapting to fit any size or situation, wrapping around the sides of the distinctive packaging, in a circle on social media, or dynamically moving in video. The logo is set in a slightly customized version of the friendly sans serif Brown Pro, which also serves as the primary typeface.
Before getting started on the identity, the Pentagram designers collaborated on the look and product experience of Lovevery’s first offering, Play Gym that includes a whole year of activities. Flaps on the cloth playmat open up individually to reveal different development zones, encouraging sensory exploration, hiding and finding, sound making and other activities. As the baby gets older, the play gym can be transformed into a tent for additional ways to play.
The graphic elements of the Play Gym helped shape the overall aesthetic of the branding and are carried throughout the identity. Pentagram created hand-painted watercolor patterns in a lively, spontaneous style, which appear on the play gym flaps, and other fabric elements of their product line. The flaps are labeled using a color tab system, a graphic motif carried across the whole brand, from play guides to the website.
With their strong typography, the Play Kit boxes are instantly recognizable, yet use minimal brown packaging to reduce waste. As part of the messaging, Jeremy Faro developed witty names for the Kits―“The Senser,” “The Looker,” “The Explorer”―that tie into the featured stage or activity. The team designed an unboxing experience that introduces the products inside, using an interior splash card that shows everything in the kit, organized in a free-flowing timeline.
The warm and modern visual approach carries over to other products designed by Pentagram. A series of board books features photography of real children, not illustrations, recognizing that babies like to see other babies, with crisp, candid portraits by photographer Maren Caruso capturing the real emotions of the kids. Development card sets that help baby’s vision feature high contrast black-and-white illustrations and complex patterns.
The Lovevery website design is clean, clear and welcoming. Modular navigation uses the color system of the play kits to allows users to easily shop the collection and see what’s inside each box. A series of custom icons illustrates how the subscription process works. The team also developed social media assets that feature a fun and useful mix of parenting tips from development experts and photography and video of the toys in action with kids.
