As objects, puzzles have long had fuddy-duddy connotations — they are the kinds of things that you take out during the holidays or that gather dust in a grandparent’s closet. But as experiences, they can be wonderfully social or meditative and immersive. Working in design and client services, the partners at Major Studio started puzzling as a means to get away from our screens and unwind. But, despite our love of puzzles, we felt there were no design-oriented jigsaws in the marketplace, certainly not ones you would gift to a friend or display on a coffee table. Somewhat naively (!) we decided to create our own puzzle company with one intent: refresh the humble jigsaw.
We wanted to create a core brand identity that felt highly memorable. As a creative agency, we observed that many brands were starting to look the same. We sought to build a flexible system that felt varied and occasionally unexpected, like a human — a brand that has a truly opinionated personality (one that embraces unbridled color and maximalism and maybe even takes things too far sometimes.) We designed a custom wordmark with playful, bespoke letters — a combination of caps and lowercase. The brand color palette is bold and maximalist, with bright purples, red, lavenders, and a highlighter yellow, while the packaging palette is an infinite palette of bold, often intentionally-clashing colors.
We built out a comprehensive verbal identity to pair with the visual components of the brand: Piecework speaks like an eccentric relative who spent too much time abroad. It doesn’t shy away from big vocab words and might occasionally make up its own word for something. It may have had too many glasses of champagne. This voice ends up playing a prominent role across touchpoints inclusive of packaging, which highlights typography and nomenclature.
If our core brand is an eccentric bon vivant, the puzzles are its wide-ranging, dilettante children. The packaging system enables each puzzle to have its own personality — a miniature world to lose yourself in — and the names are written on the front and down the sides of the box so they can collect on your shelf and be read like the spines of your most treasured books. (Spaghetti Western is an homage to niche cinema. Apre?s Ski is an 80s euro alps moment. Bread Head is a psychedelic take on carbs. The list goes on!) Each puzzle has a different color scheme, further opening up the brand to various color combinations, and allowing customers to mix-and-match on their shelves and coffee tables.
Ultimately, Piecework positions jigsaw puzzles as objects that deserve as much consideration as everything else in our lives. The name itself is a nod to the process of piecing something together. From unboxing to placing the final piece and putting the jigsaw onto your shelf, the brand uses every opportunity to communicate its colorful, quirky personality.
