Saint-Urbain builds Gap Tooth Soda around imperfection as a principle

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Saint-Urbain builds Gap Tooth Soda around imperfection as a principle

Design brandingpackaging the-brandidentity.com

A botanical soda brand builds its identity around imperfection as a design principle, pairing strict structural consistency with deliberately hand-drawn wobble.

What: Gap Tooth Soda is a Toronto botanical soda brand designed by Saint-Urbain studio, using deliberately imperfect hand-drawn elements—a wobbly wordmark, irregular fruit illustrations, and simple characters—within a rigid structural system to create personality while maintaining brand recognition across flavors.

Why it matters: This demonstrates how restraint and principle-based design create scalable identity systems that maintain personality without collapsing into visual noise or gimmicks—the "gap" concept guides composition and spacing rather than appearing as literal missing letters or obvious voids.

Takeaway: When designing brand systems, establish a disciplined structural floor first, then layer personality selectively—if everything has character, nothing stands out.

Deep dive

The founder's personal gap tooth (shared by roughly a quarter of the global population) inspired the brand concept, which expanded into imperfection as a broader design principle
A strict structural system—locked wordmark position, can architecture, and hierarchy—prevents the hand-drawn elements from becoming visual noise
The custom wordmark appears hand-drawn with imperfect baseline alignment and wobbly terminals, but earlier versions with exaggerated letter-spacing were rejected for tipping into visual pun territory
Agipo typeface in Bold and Regular handles clarity across cans and campaigns while the wordmark carries warmth
A hand-drawn character system with consistent line weight and simple features can substitute for nouns in sentences on shipping boxes, testing whether characters are confident enough to read instantly
Three launch flavors (Cherry, Yuzu, Peach) share the same cream background and structure, differentiated only by fruit illustration and color palette
The "gap" surfaces subtly in spacing and composition, not as missing letters or engineered voids—treated as a principle rather than a graphic device
The system passes a scalability test: new flavors, formats, or campaigns can plug in without redesigning the core structure
Saint-Urbain rejected a more abstract, designer-led direction with large color blocks creating visual gaps, agreeing with the client that fruit illustrations were the right call
The design intentionally maintains imperfection (wobbly wordmark, plain character noses, loose illustrations) even as the brand scales, refusing conventional polish

Decoder

Saint-Urbain: Independent strategy and design studio founded in Montreal, now based in New York
Agipo: Typeface by Radim Pesko used for body copy, flavor descriptors, and campaign text

Original article

The Gap Tooth brand pairs a strict structural system (consistent layout, hierarchy, and typography) with deliberately imperfect, hand-drawn elements—like its wobbly wordmark, simple characters, and irregular fruit illustrations—to create personality without losing clarity. By treating “the gap” as a subtle guiding principle rather than an obvious visual gimmick, the design stays flexible and scalable across flavors and formats while prioritizing brand recognition over individual variations.

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