New Informal Tea Packaging
We’ve recently refreshed the packaging and website design for New Zealand’s best tea company — Informal Tea Co. Continuing Informal’s tradition of bold colours, we’ve introduced new quirky collaged illustrations for each of the hand-blended organic teas.
Action Method Live
It’s nice to see the bold new website for Action Method go live — Ghostly and Behance’s chic notebook project. New York designer Wade Jeffree designed it, we built it.
“Assembled in the United States, with high-quality materials sourced from trusted vendors, each book is crafted with meticulous care and consideration. Soft-to-the-touch fibermark covers, spot gloss deboss, post-consumer recycled 80lb premium blend paper, and dot grid matrices all add up to the perfect formula for inspired productivity” — Action Method. Get ’em here.
White Moss Store Launched
We’ve been lucky enough to partner with the amazing White Moss to launch their online store. Check out the shop and find your money magically spending itself on their first drop of super sweet Bali inspired homeware and furniture.
Anthony Burrill x The Designers Foundry Auction
We’re excited to announce our work with The Designer’s Foundry building the countdown silent auction system for their special collaboration with legendary type designer Anthony Burrill.
To mark the release of FUNCTION typeface by Anthony Burrill, TDF and Burrill commissioned Thomas Mayo to craft a special woodblock alphabet. Each woodblock is an edition of one, a true collectors item. Each block is 15cm (5.9 inch) in height, hand made by Mayo in London. The woodblocks are wrapped in organic tissue paper and packed in a foam lined luxury kraft box with red foil detailing.
Get in on the auction at: thedesignersfoundry.com
Design Assembly Interview
Tim has been interviewed (telling it like it is) by the freshly re-designed Design Assembly blog about launching and growing The Suburbs out of recession, lessons learned and life living in London — check it out here.

Pottery Tea Cups
The Suburbs co-founder Tim is obsessed with pottery. Hopefully in the near future a full blown business can be born out of it (watch this space!) but for the time-being though we’re pretty swamped with Design work with little time for making a mess with clay. Here are some of Tim’s creations which we released through Informal Tea and are now unfortunately sold out.
Check out more of Tim’s pottery work here and here.
The Designers Foundry
We’ve been lucky enough to partner with The Designers Foundry in updating and improving their online store.
TDF is a hand-picked team of type designers from all around the world and have licensed fonts to major international clients such as Nike, Harper Collins, Dolce and Gabbana, EA Games and the BBC.
We helped TDF to impliment a new homepage design, streamline search functionalities and develop a more user focused navigation which could be simplified on the bold and graphic product pages.
Best Awards
Superb news, our work with DDMMYY on NZ Breast Cancer’s 1000 Woman Campaign won Silver (for Design communication) and Bronze (for small brand identity) at this year’s NZ Best Design Awards.
Science Poster Co.
We’ve just launched a website for Science Poster Co who sell pretty awesome, minimalist and abstract art prints based around Scientific thoughts, themes and ideas.
Informal Tea Co
We’ve just launched a refreshed website for our organic tea company, Informal Tea Co.
The brief was to improve upon the existing website with a new design which was more refined and customer focused on both desktop and mobile.
The existing site was showing it’s age technologically speaking so a key element of the re-design was to make use of modern technologies for improved SEO, UI/UX, speed and customer flow. The design looks to make better use of the blog to build site content and integrates new features such as customer reviews to help boost sales and we’ve planned for future functionality to be easily integrated through the new tabbed product pages.
Simple Watch
Typograph Journal
Otama typeface has been featured in Volume 3 of the fantastic Typograph.Journal published by Nicole Arnett Phillips. Feeling rather privileged indeed to be included amongst design legends such as Vince Frost and New Zealand’s own Kris Sowersby.
The 3rd volume of T.J focuses on the subjects of Visual metrics, optical illusions at play in typography, typographic contrast and stress, and much much more. Weighing in at a decent 164 pages its well worth the money, check it out here.
The Watch Company
This year we had the opportunity to work with The Watch Company. For over 10 years, TWC has been New Zealand’s largest watch merchant on Trademe.
In late 2014 TWC approached The Suburbs to develop and launch their own storefront and expand their online presence.
The task involved developing a unique visual language that would become iconic of TWC’s flagship eCommerce site.
3 sales points (free shipping, lowest prices and service) were the key parameters surrounding every design decision from the product and information hierarchy and layout through to the smart no fuss navigation system.
The visual framework we developed was built around a bold and sophisticated photographic style, color, font and UI/UX guidelines. Thoughtful and consistent implementation helps to build a memorable brand experience customers will tell their friends about.
A strong example of this framework in action is the unforgettably bold navigation system consisting of just 4 key links; Mens, Womans, Brands and Search. The minimal menu confidently welcomes the customer into the website and directs them to where the want to be as quick as possible.
More literally we have repeated these three sales points in text throughout the sales funnel from the homepage through to the product collection and product pages. Special care was taken to present these sales points in a clear and coherent fashion while conforming to the strictly sharp and sophisticated visual framework.
New Zealand Breast Cancer 1000 Tees
Last week we launched a rather special pop-up eCommerce website for The New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation.
Led by the fact that this summer in New Zealand, one thousand women will be diagnosed with breast cancer; The Suburbs worked alongside Previously Unavailable and DDMMYY to develop this unique fundraiser website selling 1000 Tees for each of the 1000 woman who will be effected by Cancer this summer.
A special thank you goes out to Commercial Type who kindly donated their font Darby Sans (orginally commissioned for the 2013 redesign of Wallpaper Magazine ) which was used extensively through the branding and Tee Shirt design.
Rozha One + Google Fonts
Exciting news, Rozha One, the font I worked on during my time in India has now been released on Google Fonts.
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