Saxon Campbell’s Ribbit is a self-initiated brand of pickled frog legs — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Ribbit is a self-initiated brand of pickled frog legs, conceptualised and designed by New York-based brand designer Saxon Campbell. He’s purposefully kept personal projects going alongside his client work. “These self-initiated projects are where I can follow an idea purely because I think it’s interesting, weird or worth exploring,” he explains. “I’m originally from Oklahoma, and frog legs were always a thing there. I actually thought they were pretty gross growing up, which is probably part of why I find them so interesting now. People eat them; people catch them, but there’s still something inherently weird about them. And with everyone pickling everything these days, I started thinking, why not frog legs? I hadn’t really seen them packaged that way before, and visually I knew they’d make for a pretty interesting jar.”

“I knew from the beginning that I wanted the brand to have a sense of humour, and Ribbit felt like a really natural way into that. When you think about actually going out and catching frogs, ‘ribbit’ is essentially what you’re listening for. It’s the sound that leads you to them, and probably one of the last sounds you hear before you catch one,” Campbell notes. “From there, that personality started working its way into the rest of the identity, especially the copy. There are lines like ‘A Croak, Madame?’ playing off a croque madame, or ‘Hop In,’ which obviously references the frog but also feels like this casual invitation to dig into the jar,” he continues. Two more lines appear on the jar. “‘Caught and Pickled by Hand’ was almost my version of ‘farm to table,’” he adds. “I wanted Ribbit to borrow that language but push it somewhere a little unexpected. ‘Straight from the Bayou to the Brine’ sounds like it could be a completely legitimate provenance story, but when you’re talking about a jar full of frog legs, there’s something inherently funny about taking it that seriously.”

Southern pantry and pickle packaging typically leans on bold, saturated colours and vintage-style produce labels to signal small-batch, heritage authenticity. “I still wanted Ribbit to have some connection to that world, so there are little references to it in things like the stickers, the hand-drawn typography and some of the bolder colour choices. But I wanted everything around those elements to feel much more restrained. Keeping the label minimal and grounding it with cleaner typography brought it into the present and created a nice contrast with some of the weirder, more playful parts of the identity,” Campbell reasons.

The product name and headlines are set in a typeface called The Poet. “It has this really exaggerated thick-to-thin quality that reminded me of the shape of a frog leg itself – long, thin, a little wet and organic, and maybe even slightly gross. It also brought in some of that Southern character I wanted without having to be too literal about it,” he explains. Ladna, a minimal and utilitarian sans serif, sits against The Poet. “I didn’t want the identity to become overly themed or cheesy, so having that really clean sans serif helped keep everything contemporary and made it feel like something you might actually want to buy,” he details. Different weights and styles of Trade Gothic appear on some of the stickers and smaller graphic moments, bringing in a more vintage packaging feel.

For the jar, Campbell modelled his own version in Cinema 4D. “I wanted it to reference a traditional pickling jar, but not feel overly vintage,” he notes. “For the cap, I went in a much more contemporary direction. I intentionally avoided some of the more expected pickle jar details and designed something simpler that could eventually change colour between flavours,” he continues. The frog legs started as one leg, modelled and textured in Cinema 4D and Redshift. “I cloned it into 12 individual legs and ran a soft body simulation inside the jar. That allowed them to naturally fall against one another, press against the glass and find their own positions. It gave the inside of the jar a much more believable, slightly imperfect quality,” he adds. Campbell designed the label in Figma and built the glass, liquid and other materials in Redshift.

“I also wanted some of the campaign images to have this slightly eerie, wet, swampy feeling that was harder to get from a traditional studio render alone. For those, I took the finished renders into Kive and used AI as a final art-direction layer to push the atmosphere further,” Campbell concludes.