Based in London, Crucible is a award-winning lab and consultancy operating in drinks and flavour development. Known for having an experimental approach to drink-making, the team has worked with small startups and a multitude of big drink brands, from Johnnie Walker and Belvedere to Lavazza and Fever Tree.

With so many high-profile clients under its belt, Crucible wanted an identity and digital presence that reflected this success, honing in on the unique experiments that it conducts at its lab. Founder Stuart Bale knew just who to call for this brief – his long-standing collaborator Chris Collicott of Madalena Studio, who he met a decade earlier.

After receiving the brief, Collicott and his colleague Oliwia Mendel set about thinking of ways to capture the essence of Crucible’s work in a bright and fun way. Naturally, this led them to the processes that are behind much of their incredible drinks and flavours.

Before even getting a green light from Bale, they began culturing various samples in petri dishes to observe how organic forms could create eye-catching designs. They photographed the shifting patterns of bacteria and showed the Crucible team, who were immediately onboard with the idea, revealing that they too had dabbled in such ideas.

“I think because we’d presented it to them at a point which already looked quite interesting rather than earlier in the process, they were quite happy for us to continue moving forward and seeing where it took us,” recalls Collicott.

With the concept signed off, the next task for Madalena was to expand on it, broadening the sample range to more than 20 and discovering as many textures, colours and formations as possible. The full list of samples include aged kombucha, a liquid culture of lion’s mane fungi, household food waste, and swabs from skin and soil solutions.

These were swabbed onto laser-cut cork logos in lo-fi lab conditions and then cultivated in petri dishes in a makeshift incubator in the basement of Collicott’s house. From here, the bacteria was left to grow, filling the logos with unusual forms and shapes.

Unfortunately for Collicott, the growth needed to be photographed on a very regular basis. This meant going back to his house from the studio to shoot it during the day, but also getting up in the early hours to capture it as well.

“Luckily I live quite close to our studio so I could pop home during the day and shoot, but getting up in the middle of the night for weeks on end was quite draining after a while, and frankly it all felt a bit crazy at times,” says Collicott. “Near the end we went back and did another batch to try and cultivate a wider range of textures and forms using different samples, which worked really well, but the overall process of growing and capturing did require quite a bit of commitment I have to say.”

These transformations were then taken into post-production where Collicott and Mendel fiddled with the colours to achieve the right look and feel for Crucible. Specifically, they inverted the colours to create fluorescent pinks and greens, and landed on the final palettes by simply applying the respective colour settings to each sequence and allowing it to change naturally as the actual colours of the sample changed over time.

“[Crucially], apart from the colour adjustments, the natural forms are completely unedited. It’s important that this element was completely authentic,” Collicott explains.

The result of these experiments is a logo brimming with life, containing a ‘C’ letterform inside of a petri dish. Of course, it would have been a shame to have watched these amazing transformations taking place before their eyes and not use them in some way for the branding, so Collicott and Mendel also created videos of the culturing process, treating viewers to stunning displays of shifting colour and form.

Reflecting on this, Collicott explains: “I’ve long been inspired by organic form and texture. It was exciting to experiment with this kind of natural growth, creating beautiful, unexpected forms, rather than using code or AI, reflecting the physical nature of Crucible’s work. Having created just a few parameters, we didn’t know what was going to happen, but it was energising to watch each culture grow and develop over time.”

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