A Spice Brand Built for the Notes Cooks Make in the Margins

The best part of any recipe isn’t the printed steps. It’s the notes cooks scribble beside them: a pinch more heat, extra garlic, measure with your heart. Margins is a spice brand built around those notes. The blends are a starting point, and the goal is to make people comfortable bending them toward what they like, whether that’s spicy or mild, heavier on one spice or lighter on another.

Client
Margins
Year
2025
Role
Art Director, Designer
Industry
Food & Beverage
Services
Brand Identity, Packaging Design

Brand Identity

Margins is a system, not just a logo with a color palette, and it’s built to expand. Its core elements, a stamp, a monogram and a pattern, work as parts that combine, scale and reshape for each new blend, promotion or format.

The language is organic and hand-made, with lines that loosen and loop like a cook’s handwriting, so every application feels touched rather than stamped out. Vintage influences from historic spice-trade maps, nautical lettering and American roadside graphics give the system a sense of history while keeping it flexible enough to grow.

Flat lay of Margins cards in royal blue, red and cream, with a blue For Your Version card at the center and red looping pattern cards around it
Close-up of the circular Margins stamp in red and blue: Spices and Seasonings, USA, PA, on cream paper over blue
Pile of cream cards printed with mirrored Margins wordmarks and two blue winged horses around a red sunburst

Packaging

The label stays constant: arched wordmark, monospace descriptor and the monogram seal. Each blend brings its own color through the ingredient itself, so the shelf reads as one family with a lot of personality. Back labels list every ingredient in plain language, so cooks know exactly what they’re adding before they start adjusting.

Recipes & Notes

Recipe cards are built to be written on. Alongside what to get and what to do, each card suggests what to change, turning the brand line into a habit rather than a slogan.