X-Gold

X-Gold didn't start as a project, it started as a single design. @the_designation put out a Christmas special brief on Twitter, given a photo of a wrapped gift box and asked to build a festive-themed design around it. Colors, typography, and brand were entirely open, the only fixed piece was that gift box image.

I decided to run with a gadget store, so the box became the centerpiece of an ad for X-Gold, wrapped in a smartwatch, AirPods, and smartphones spilling out. Here's the original post with the finished design.

The design that started it all, built for Designation's Christmas special brief.

Once the Christmas piece was out, X-Gold felt like it deserved more than one post. I kept the brand and built it out into a full series, covering different product categories a gadget store would actually push: cameras, wearables, laptops, gaming, TVs, and audio.

Black and gold became the core palette, gold reads as premium and tech-forward without needing to lean on any one device's actual brand colors, and it holds up consistently whether the hero image is a camera lens, a MacBook, or a pair of AirPods.

Next Gen

Own Your Day on Your Wrist

MacBook

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Entertainment

Sound

Christmas

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Building a brand from a single prompt is a different exercise from working off a full brief. There was no deck of rules to follow, so every choice after that first Christmas post had to answer to the one before it, the gold had to feel like the same gold, the tone had to feel like the same store talking.

It also pushed me to think about a brand's flexibility. A gadget store has to sell a camera one week and a TV the next, so the system needed enough range to carry very different hero images without losing what made it read as X-Gold in the first place.