Creative recruitment par-excellence, for when it absolutely totally MUST be right

Mustard

The challenge

This is a partnership that began in 2004, when the world was young! We’ve just completed the third iteration of the Mustard brand; the second happened around 2012.

Mustard is a recruitment consultancy specialising in graphic design and the creative industries. Its director, Ian Coulson, is highly driven, extremely meticulous, obsessed with quality, he deeply loves design, he is extraordinarily knowledgable, and a natural people-person, all of which makes him brilliant at what he does. Mustard specialises in finding the very best designers and creatives, so the brief was always to get the notion of quality across, but in his relaxed, slightly irreverent, fun and cheeky way.

 

What we did

The first iteration of the brand in 2004 was fairly literal, centring around mustard as a product itself, and the idea of food, pairing things together, bringing the best out of each other, and so on.

The first rebrand, in 2012, focussed on ‘cut the mustard’ as a campaign, with the by now fairly recognisable logo literally cut and rearranged to make lovely-sounding, provocative and curious words, around which we could extol Mustard’s virtues.

Recently launched in 2020, the new brand, developed in collaboration with Kimpton Creative, is a response to how recruitment has changed. As people get more precise and more demanding in their requests, the message is that if you want to be picky, that’s just fine by us, that plays to our strengths. But this has given us the scope to have quite a lot of fun.

What happened next

Mustard has thrived for over 16 years. Projects, careers and creative teams do get changed as a result of Ian’s work… recruitment is all about change. Now and again, one hopes that people in need find him and trust him as a result of our work. The gallery runs back in in time, starting with the new brand.

The pencil sets produced with Kimpton Creative won Silver for Writing for Design at the 2020 Fresh Awards, and a D&AD Wood Pencil for Writing for Design.

"The magic, the oxygen of my brand." Ian Coulson Director, Mustard