Glasfurd & Walker is a Vancouver, Canada-based brand and design agency founded in 2007 by Creative Director Phoebe Glasfurd and Managing Director Aren Fieldwalker, who met at an agency in Sydney before relocating to Vancouver.[1] The studio specializes in brand creation and identity systems for hospitality, food and beverage, retail, beauty, and lifestyle clients.[2] The firm describes its own work as “defiantly different, driven by strong narratives and inviting at all touch points.”[3]
Design and History
Glasfurd & Walker’s own visual identity is a typographic wordmark that pairs the founders’ surnames with an ampersand. The studio’s website displays the wordmark prominently, set in a condensed display typeface, with the tagline “Building Brand Worlds®” appearing alongside it.[4] The wordmark appears in black on the studio’s site, establishing a consistent presence across its digital presence.
The studio’s portfolio website, developed by Grafik, a New Zealand-based design firm, was created to express the brand worlds Glasfurd & Walker builds for its clients. The typography pairs two type families from Klim Type Foundry: Domaine Display Condensed is used for the logo, intro animation, and menu, while Söhne handles headlines and information throughout the site.[5]
While the studio’s own mark is a straightforward typographic wordmark, Glasfurd & Walker is better known for the custom identities it creates for clients. These include custom wordmarks for restaurants and brands such as AMA, where the team set the design in a custom type “reminiscent of flowing water and rounded like a pearl,”[6] and Aburi Tora, where the studio created a custom wordmark and typeface with high contrast, inspired by Japanese calligraphic letters translated into modern roman forms.[7]
Meaning and Symbolism
Glasfurd & Walker’s approach to identity is guided by three stated principles: curiosity and consideration, concept and narrative, and collaboration. The studio emphasizes that “the backbone to any great brand or concept is a narrative; story and strategy drive our process, creative and business decisions.”[2] This narrative-driven philosophy extends to the studio’s own branding, where the wordmark serves as a direct, unadorned representation of the founders’ names rather than a symbolic mark.
Typography and Design
For its own website, Glasfurd & Walker uses Domaine Display Condensed for the logo and menu, paired with Söhne for headlines and body information.[5] The studio’s client work frequently involves custom typography, as seen in the AMA wordmark and the Aburi Tora custom typeface.[6][7]
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