Moksi by FCKLCK Studio — BP&O

Dutch studio FCKLCK’s all-caps, blood-red web site is stuffed with declarations of belligerent provocations comparable to ‘OUR FAVOURITE CLIENTS ARE THE ONES WHO HAVE EVEN BIGGER BALLS THAN WE DO’. Speak of ‘CUTTING THROUGH THE BULLSHIT’ is accompanied by a mouseover gif of a defecating bovine. The title is in fact an expletive repudiation of serendipity (who wants luck whenever you’ve such prodigious knackers, proper?). But, such obvious brashness belies a perspicacity and lightness of contact that enables FCKLCK to create work like its id for Moksi, a unisex skincare model that creates skincare merchandise for people who find themselves present process most cancers remedy.

FCKLCK was approached in late 2022 by aspiring entrepreneur Lies De Nyn. Having not too long ago overcome breast most cancers, Lies skilled firsthand the challenges of sourcing and evaluating skincare merchandise suitable with radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and different most cancers therapies. As Moksi explains on its web site, one of many many unwanted effects of most cancers therapies is that ‘your pores and skin’s pure immunity and protecting barrier can turn out to be compromised, making it extremely delicate to sure components, merchandise and environmental components’.

Along with a specifically tailor-made components, the branding for such a product must be exactly calibrated to talk to folks for whom sickness has turn out to be one thing that begins to outline them within the totalising expertise of being ‘a affected person’. Moksi goals to reclaim a few of life’s easy pleasures from the cavernous maw of sickness and remedy. Skincare is ritual, and ritual is profoundly human and humanising. FCKLCK’s work for Moksi recognises these important truths.

FCKLCK factors out that it was concerned from the inception of this challenge, providing enter on the naming of the model. It says the selection was ‘instinctive – upon assembly Lies the phrase “moxie” instantly resonated’. The adjusted spelling is a canny strategic transfer, distancing the time period from its dated Jazz-age ring of female feistiness and as an alternative ‘imbu[ing] the model with a way of neutrality’. The phonetic spelling – which in case-study communicate ‘incorporat[es] a strong Ok’ – additionally turns into ‘a pivotal component within the brand design’.

FCKLCK’s logotype takes a less-is-more method, with profitable outcomes. The unadorned wordmark is ready in Editorial New Ultralight, from kind foundry Pangram Pangram. A slight modification to the Ok (rounding and softening the usually sharp vertex of the higher and decrease arms right into a sensuous curve) properly picks up the languidly curved brackets of the serifs, and highlights a satisfying stress between these curves and the in any other case quite spiky profile of this light-weight font.

The emblem seems at giant scale (usually full-width), wherever it’s used throughout web site, packaging and posters. The mixture of rounded and angular kinds creates sufficient rhythm to maintain curiosity even when used on this manner as a bigger graphic component.

PP Editorial New can be used all through model communications for top-level headings and pullouts, carrying on from the emblem a sense of chic restraint and sly subversion of custom. Most purposes, nonetheless, are set in Mori Common (additionally from Pangram Pangram), used for each headings and physique copy. It is smart to keep away from overusing PP Editorial New, since most layouts are already dominated by the large-scale wordmark. FCKLCK contends that ‘the usage of Mori Common contributes sophistication and readability, making certain that informative textual content stays legible and tranquil’. It’s a wonderfully rational font pairing with the excellently chosen Editorial New, although there’s one thing a bit chilly and robotic about it that barely misses the mark – maybe it’s these elongated, linear apostrophes and commas. This font pairing highlights the marginally unusual place that this id occupies, poised between luxurious and sickness.

If the font pairing misses the mark on this level, then FCKLCK’s extremely distinctive color palette and set of patterned gradients present the right Rothko-esque summary canvases wherein to learn spiralling depths of philosophical that means. They’re tentative, mild, subtly joyful, but additionally faintly queasy and pallid. They’ve a pale, muted magnificence, in a manner that maybe speaks empathetically to these present process remedy, quite than assailing them with belligerent cheerfulness.

FCKLCK explains that the palette is a deliberate gesture to daybreak skies, ‘a symbolic illustration of recent beginnings and an optimistic method to taking every day because it comes’. Whereas a few of the softer blue and pink palettes extra clearly match this rationale, there’s something a bit extra surreal, extra psychedelic, concerning the idiosyncratic color mixtures and the repetition of the gradients into scalloped, wave-like kinds than only a naturalistic simulation of daybreak skies. They really feel extra paying homage to the blurs of vague color that burst behind your eyelids whenever you have a look at the solar too lengthy – that’s, there’s something about these color decisions and gradients that speaks of an intimate, bodily interiority, at the least as a lot as any exterior reference within the pure world.

These refined evocations of the colors and textures of our inside world call to mind Viriginia Woolf’s description, in her celebrated essay On Being Sick, of ‘the undiscovered international locations… what wastes and deserts… what precipices and lawns sprinkled with vibrant flowers’ are disclosed ‘when the lights of well being go down’.

That very same quiet grace and tenderness pervades the pictures, which approaches fine-art ranges of documentary lyricism in exhibiting human beings performing essentially the most innate self-care rituals within the face of horrible struggling. This isn’t the half-hearted stab at ‘no-filter’ realism that’s usually produced from such a quick. Many of those pictures are genuinely nice portraits. You surprise concerning the folks depicted: their names, their diagnoses, their joys and their ache. FCKLCK says that the pictures ’employs pure lighting to seize actual folks in real environments, reinforcing the model’s dedication to transparency and connection.’

On this visible id, the altered panorama of sickness is conjured with such magnificence that at no level is Moksi made to really feel medicinal or gloomy. Reasonably, such a nuanced and articulate engagement with sickness effectively equips this model to frankly survey the topography of that unusual land, and to talk to the very actual wants of those that discover themselves instantly inhabiting it.