‘Visual Joy’ guides Bathgate Design’s identity for artist Alex Fulton — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

For 12 years, New Zealand artist and interior designer Alex Fulton presented herself through the same identity. “Eventually you realise you’ve moved and the furniture hasn’t,” Fulton tells us. Her practice runs across interiors, teaching, speaking and the original pieces that she sells through galleries, while the art has increasingly become a much bigger part of what she does. She asked Bathgate Design for a new identity that could represent all of that rather than a tidy-up of the one she already had. The Christchurch-based branding and graphic design studio was invited to create the strategy, identity, copywriting, art direction and photography, as well as the website design.

Fulton’s artistic practice explores colour, form and structure through hard-edge abstraction. “My biggest worry was probably that it would become too polished, too serious or too ‘designery.’ My work has always been colourful, confident and a little bit irreverent, and I wanted the identity to have that same energy without shouting over the work,” she explains.

“We were completely let into Alex’s world. Her home, her studio and her creative process,” Bathgate Design’s Creative Director Charlotte Sole tells us. “Rather than focusing on what Alex does, we focused on what sits underneath all of it: her curiosity, her instinct, her zest, her taste and her particular way of seeing the world. A big part of our strategy was identifying the creative tensions that make her work successful in the first place: maximalism and restraint, play and precision, observation and originality. The identity works in much the same way. It’s about knowing when to push and when to hold back.”

“I didn’t want to art-direct my own rebrand through somebody else’s hands,” Fulton notes. “I wanted to trust good designers to do what they do best.” ‘Visual Joy’ became the strategy’s guiding compass. “There’s always a sense of beauty and joy,” Sole details, “but it’s never simply colourful for colour’s sake.”

At the concept stage, Bathgate Design presented a mark, but the studio and Fulton decided together that the brand did not need one. “The wordmark felt enough to carry the identity on its own,” Sole explains. That wordmark is set in Diverse A, from type foundry DDOTT, in a Black weight that Sole describes as “strong, smart and confident, with just enough flair to feel like Alex.” For wider use, the studio chose Reformat A, from type foundry SM, which brings a more neutral and timeless quality.

“The restraint mainly lives in the typography and compositions. Colour is allowed to be bold and expressive, but the graphic language around it is deliberately more controlled. The typography is strong and simple, and we’re quite disciplined about how much copy we put into a space,” Sole notes. Each composition is built on a grid, with areas left deliberately plain so the expressive elements have room to work.

Black sits alongside the bold colour. “It grounds the palette and brings a certain maturity and sophistication to what could otherwise become overly sweet or playful,” Sole observes. “Colour itself is also about restraint in the way it’s paired,” Sole adds. “It’s about knowing which combinations have the right feel and tension, and how they can lift an image, artwork or space.” The palette moves with the piece, collection or project in front of it, and the system leaves that call to the studio and Fulton to make intuitively. Fulton has spent years working professionally with colour, so the brand does not tell her how to use it.

All of the imagery was made for the rebrand, with photography by Meg Stuthridge and Toaki Okano. Because the image library had two different jobs to do, Bathgate Design commissioned two shoots. “We didn’t want every image to feel like a hero shot,” Sole details. The first took place in a photographic studio and brought the bold colour, hard-edged compositions and visual strength that the hero imagery needed. The second was shot in Fulton’s home, looser and more everyday, closer to fashion photography, for a library that sits across social and digital channels.

“Alex’s website is more mature, artful and prestigious, while her social presence sounds much more like everyday Alex,” Sole tells us. “The challenge was finding the balance between Alex’s natural wit, humour and playfulness, and the very real gravitas she has earned through years of experience,” Sole continues. The voice was drawn from Fulton’s wit and charm, which the studio named ‘The Artful Charmer’ as a foundation.

“It’s probably still too early for me to draw a straight line between the new identity and particular jobs, but it has changed how people understand what I do. It gives much more room to the art and the broader creative work alongside interiors, which is important because that’s genuinely where my practice is now,” Fulton tells us. “I’m presenting myself in a way that feels current rather than relying on an identity created for a version of my practice from 12 years ago. And I think that gives people permission to approach me with slightly different, more unexpected things.”