Beats Meets Kiko Kostadinov for Bulgarian-Inspired Pill Speaker
After launching new Beats Pill colorways last month,Beatsdebuts its latest collaboration with London-based designerKiko Kostadinov. The special-edition Beats Pill is drenched in cultural references, paying tribute to the designer's Bulgarian roots with traditional accents.
The compact Beats Pill design honors Kiko's Bulgarian roots with a custom grill inspired by ornate geometry and the region's artistic history. Presented by Spanish rap starBB Trickz, the speaker comes tethered to a colorful braided lanyard representing traditional talismans used in Bulgarian ceremonies.
The Beats Pill continues to thrive with a powerful sound system and bold 24-hour battery life. With the ability to fill the room with commanding tunes, the petite speaker boasts Fast Fuel charging and updated USB-C ports.
Take a closer look at Kiko Kostadinov's Beats Pill collaboration in the gallery above. It comes in 'Kiko Gray' and will be available at select retailers on August 15.
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The London graphic designer creating fonts for Real Madrid and Revolut
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Bloom recalls when he went on holiday to Menorca with his wife and two teenage children this summer and saw the Ambit typeface he designed everywhere on Tui's branding at Stansted airport. 'It was a really nice moment,' he says, although he was perhaps the only passenger to notice. We often take typefaces for granted. But there are thousands of them out there Bloom stumbled into typeface design 'almost by accident' after building a successful career in graphic design. As a teenager growing up in Winchmore Hill in north London, where he 'loved art at school', he won a book token. With it he bought a book at WHSmith about graphic design, 'not really knowing what it was'. But the impact was immediate. A placement at a local design agency followed 'and I fell in love with it and felt that this is what I wanted to do'. He studied visual communication design at Middlesex University before joining a local advertising agency. This was the late 1990s and one of Bloom's early jobs was designing flyers for some of the super-clubs of the era including Ministry of Sound. In 2009 he was made redundant and decided to set up his own agency called Mash Creative. The 'sliding doors' moment came when the design and architecture magazine Icon approached him to pen for its monthly feature Rethink, in which a guest writer is invited to give a pretend refresh to a well-established brand. Bloom recalls, 'I decided to do the Royal Mail logo, and off the back of that I started to design a typeface I called RM Regular. It was all fictional, I wanted to design a typeface that didn't exist for Royal Mail. I got lucky, before that I was not particularly well known in the industry, but that project featured on a lot of design blogs.' A stream of prestigious design work from global brands such as Coca-Cola, Beats by Dre, Pringles and Nike followed over the next few years. 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Rather than sell his new creation through a typeface foundry — which normally take a 50 per cent commission — Bloom set up his own micro-site and went direct to punters with Aeonik. It is still his biggest-selling typeface. Other fonts quickly followed: Coanda, combining 'a technological aesthetic with subtle human touches'; Ambit, 'an eccentric and distinctive sans-serif font'; and yet another iteration of that old Royal Mail update called RM Neue. This quartet launched CoType Foundry in 2019 but now there is a family of 18 typefaces all produced from Bloom's small office — or, more accurately, from the computers of his working-from-home team of five. From the off, the typeface business 'skyrocketed' and quickly eclipsed the existing graphic design agency. Orders now come in from around the world, especially after Greek, Korean, Cyrillic, Vietnamese, Thai and Hebrew versions of Aeonik were developed. As Bloom explains, 'There are millions of typefaces out there, but probably only a few hundred that have that level of language support, maybe less than one per cent. We felt that this was a very successful typeface, let's make it accessible not just for western Europe but globally. Now only a fraction of our orders are from the UK.' Household-name overseas clients include Spanish football club Real Madrid which, serendipitously, chose an RM font for their branding. Another big football name, the Dutch club Ajax, commissioned their own exclusive typeface — called, appropriately, Ajax — from Bloom's foundry. Dutch club Ajax, commissioned their own exclusive typeface — called, appropriately, Ajax CoType makes money from selling licences to use fonts, both online to individual and small business customers, and offline to major corporate clients. Fees start from £45 for a single type, in a single 'weight' — the measure of thickness or boldness of the characters — for a desktop licence. 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Leonardo DiCaprio and Girlfriend Vittoria Ceretti Kiss on PDA-Filled Yacht Outing in Spain
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