We Read Seasoned So You Don’t Have To (But You Probably Should)
Branding isn’t a dinner party, it’s a test kitchen.
And Koto Studio just served up something surprisingly digestible: Seasoned, a retro-futurist guide disguised as a 70s cookbook, designed to help new creatives figure out what the hell this industry actually is.
A digital hub?
They’re calling it a digital hub, but it feels more like an open kitchen. Interactive "cookbooks" walk you through the branding process the way a good chef talks you through a stew: step by step, no ego, no jargon. The first two cookbook drops Start with Strategy and The Power of Good Ideas mirror Koto’s own internal flow. Clear. Foundational. Not afraid to say the quiet stuff out loud.
The design?
Think 70s health food store meets contemporary type foundry. Grain, gradients, serif-script collisions. It’s educational, but not academic. Serious, but never self-serious. It plays like a design zine that happened to pick up a UX degree along the way.
What we love:
- The metaphor holds. Branding is a recipe, and this nails that.
- The tone is human—refreshingly so.
- The motion and interaction choices serve the content, not the ego.
What we’d steal:
- The way it uses nostalgia without leaning into kitsch
- Framing educational content as “cultural publishing”
- Editorial UX with real restraint
More importantly, Seasoned makes a clear point: you don’t have to wait to be invited in, you can just pull up a chair.
That’s something we can all back.
