Saint-Urbain builds Gap Tooth Soda around imperfection as a principle — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
Owen Walker, founder of the Toronto-based botanical soda brand GAPTOOTH, has an actual gap between his front teeth that he’d spent years hiding behind closed-mouth smiles and daydreams of orthodontic symmetry. He came round to it eventually, and the trait he had once wanted to engineer away became the seed of a brand built around imperfection as a starting point. Roughly a quarter of the global population shares the same dental feature. Saint-Urbain, the independent strategy and design studio founded in Montreal and based in New York, built the wider brand world from naming and strategy through identity, packaging and motion.
Underneath the loose, hand-drawn surface sits a disciplined system. The wordmark position, can architecture and hierarchy stay locked across every touchpoint, with the expressive choices happening only inside that frame. “Without that structural floor, the whole thing would collapse into noise,” explains Alex Ostroff, Founder & Creative Director at Saint-Urbain.
Set in all caps and slightly condensed, the custom wordmark looks visibly drawn, with baselines stopping short of perfect alignment. The O’s are just off-round and the terminals carry a handmade wobble. Earlier versions pushed the gap-tooth logic further, with wider letter-spacing and more exaggerated voids, but those versions started to tip toward visual pun. Saint-Urbain pulled back, trusting the name to carry the weight. Agipo, in Bold and Regular, picks up the rest of the typographic load across cans, flavour descriptors and campaigns, holding the line on clarity while the wordmark carries the warmth. “If everything had personality, nothing would stand out,” Ostroff notes.
Populating the system is a cast of hand-drawn characters. A spiky-haired figure recurs across packaging as the anchor, while a mouth icon operates as a piece of shorthand for the brand. Most share the same nose, all hold to a consistent line weight, and none lean too hard into cuteness. On shipping boxes, faces sit inside sentences in place of nouns. “That only works because the characters are confident enough to read instantly,” Ostroff shares, “which is really the test of whether a character system is doing its job.”
Across the three launch flavours of Cherry, Yuzu and Peach, restraint does most of the work. Every can shares the same cream background, wordmark and overall structure. What changes is the fruit illustration and the colour it carries: deep red for Cherry, bright yellow for Yuzu and a soft coral for Peach, each paired with green. The fruit drawings themselves are irregular and slightly off, sidestepping the hyper-real food photography that defines most of the category. “It would have been easy to give each flavour its own full-can colour, but then you lose the brand,” says Ostroff. “You see Gap Tooth first, flavour second. That’s the right order.”
Beyond the name, the ‘gap’ surfaces in spacing, in composition and in the way elements interact, with a character sometimes sitting inside a sentence or a pause leaving a phrase slightly unresolved. None of it leans on the obvious moves, and there are no missing letters in the wordmark or engineered voids signalling the concept on the cans. “We treated the gap as a principle rather than a graphic device,” Ostroff explains. “Once it becomes a visual pun, the idea is spent.”
Saint-Urbain had explored a more abstract, typographic direction earlier in the process, built around large blocks of colour that created the visual gaps themselves. Ostroff describes it as the most designer-led of the directions the studio considered, and the team liked it. The client asked for fruit on the cans, and Saint-Urbain agreed with the call. “The name already does so much work that the design didn’t need to over-perform,” he reflects.
Built into the system is a test the studio applied throughout the project: if a new flavour, format or campaign showed up tomorrow, could it plug in without redesigning anything? The structure stays put. The variables of fruit, character, colour and composition take on the work of adapting, with new flavours arriving through new illustrations and potentially new characters added to the cast. That logic carries cans onto billboards, packaging into social and the wider system into motion.
Refusing the conventional polish that brands tend to go for as they scale, the system keeps the wobble in the wordmark, the plain noses on the characters and the looseness in the fruit illustrations. “Perfect teeth are overrated,” Ostroff proclaims. “And so is perfect soda.”