Studio Hi Ho pairs kraft and butter yellow in Madeleine’s packaging — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Madeleine is a Melbourne-based cultured butter maker founded by Jack Gaffney, who returned to Australia after many years living in France with a dream to make butter using traditional methods. The malaxer, a historic butter-making machine that slowly kneads, folds and works the butter, is at the centre of its process. Malaxers were once commonplace in dairies, but they largely disappeared as butter production industrialised. Madeleine’s process is deliberately slower – grass-fed Jersey cow cream from West Gippsland is fermented, batch churned in the Yarra Valley and malaxed. Each portion is paddled and shaped by hand.

“My malaxer is a modern rendition of a very traditional machine – and something I saw as necessary for crafting the finest butter possible,” Gaffney explains. “Madeleine is one of only two producers in the world to use a malaxer.” Melbourne-based Studio Hi Ho designed the identity and packaging, beginning with Gaffney’s first meeting with the studio’s Director, Cam Norris. “I already had certain parts nailed down and had developed a very small presentation – but I had no starting point for design,” he recalls. He took Norris through the initial concepts of the brand, the reasons behind the name, the product and process, and his ambition. Norris then returned with an identity presentation.

The name comes from the madeleine, the small French cake, and the simple pleasure of taking the time to enjoy something properly. The idea of slowing down and savouring the moment became a starting point for the brand. “We agreed fairly early that anything overtly ‘French’ would risk feeling passé and a little inauthentic,” Norris explains. Gaffney “isn’t French, and the butter itself is made here in Victoria. So rather than treating France as an aesthetic theme, we wanted it to sit more quietly within the brand. It appears where it has a genuine connection to the product – the name, Jack’s story, the traditional process and ingredients such as Sel de Guérande,” he continues, naming the hand-harvested grey Celtic salt used in the butter.

Studio Hi Ho set the logotype in Highway Gothic, a typeface first released in 1948. “We were drawn to the slightly awkward charm of its letterforms – the proportions and shapes feel a little unusual, which gives the wordmark a memorable quality,” Norris tells us. “We added the decorative underline to give it more of a ‘logo’ quality; to us, it feels a little like a badge you might find on the side of an old French tractor.” The body copy is set in Plantin, legible at small sizes and, in Norris’s words, “a trusty serif workhorse.” “Butter is yellow, so it felt silly not to lean into that as the hero colour of the brand,” he adds.

Illustrator Pat Rogasch drew the butter-kneading process for the identity. “Our brief was to create something that felt as though it could have been plucked from the past, but would still feel contemporary well into the future,” Norris details. The linework is slightly blown out, giving the image “a nostalgic, reproduced quality, almost as though it has been printed, scanned and reinterpreted over many years.” An ‘M’ on the apron of a figure in the drawing is “a small reference back to the Madeleine logotype.”

Waxed on one side so the butter doesn’t stick to it, the kraft paper wrapper “began as a functional requirement,” Norris notes. “But once we began working with it, the natural brown of the kraft became an important part of the packaging. There’s something extremely satisfying about the combination of brown kraft and butter yellow.” The core butter has a yellow label with black type, while other butters and collaborations use a white label with coloured type, so repeat customers can “recognise their favourite variety quickly within a line-up.” When Gaffney introduced the idea of a Limited Release range, Norris saw it as “an opportunity to stretch that language a little further.” The studio added a hand-drawn typeface alongside the existing typography for the range, and the Outback butter’s label has a second line reading Limited Release.

Gaffney worked farmers’ markets every weekend for about two years, and comments on the packaging were common. “I’ve heard people say that they thought the packaging was too beautiful to open,” he remembers. The markets also led to introductions with “some of Melbourne’s most revered chefs.” The butter is served at establishments including Yiaga, Attica and Omnia, and sold in retail blocks at grocers including Meatsmith, Morning Market and Toscano’s. “Madeleine can sit comfortably alongside names such as Maker & Monger, Portside or Queen’s Harvest while still remaining immediately recognisable,” Norris observes of the brands it can now be compared to.

INTO IT art directed and styled the brand’s shoot with photographer Shelley Horan, setting tightly cropped, tactile details beside more playful, composed images. In one, the butter is shaped into a cube, cone and sphere. “There’s something slightly unexpected about treating butter almost as a sculptural material, while leaving the paddle marks visible keeps the image grounded in the handmade nature of the product,” Norris concludes.