Rusty Knit | Brand Identity, Website & Merch Collection
MELD
RAW & CHATOIC
Rusty Knit came to MELD as an apparel brand looking to build their visual identity, and a collaborative merch collection that felt raw/chaotic.
We began sketching an abstract mark inspired by the stability of an elephant—solid, geometric blocks that could live on a chest print, care label, or cap.
As we explored, the brand’s attitude started to surface.
They didn’t want to look polished or precious, they wanted to feel like a late-night sketchbook with weird ideas and creative flaws.
That’s how the line “unbothered, unpolished, unfiltered” emerged as the core of the brand strategy.
Our moodboard circled three territories:
ocean life,
dreamscape,
and abstract realism.
Instead of choosing one, we merged them into an ocean-life dreamscape:
swirling waves, clouds, tentacles, koi, and stormy horizons.
The all seeing eye/third eye became a recurring symbol.
We distilled this into the tagline “unbothered, unpolished, unfiltered” as the brand’s north star.
Strategically, this meant embracing visible texture, abstract lines, and surreal narratives rather than gloss.
The tagline guided how we drew:
lines stayed imperfect,
compositions felt slightly off-centre,
and characters (kraken, typhoons, mythic creatures) were allowed to be strange rather than “on-trend cute.”
Colour choices, textures, and layout leaned into this rawness:
high contrast, bold silhouettes, and details that reveal themselves only on a closer look, like something you’d doodle on a notebook then scale up to a back print.
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Posted Feb 23, 2026
Rusty Knit: Unbothered, Unpolished, Unfiltered. A stance we took to our design of the brand, and their pilot merch collection.
