Boom Briefs (if you haven’t come across this before) are our monthly creative challenges: fictional briefs designed to get your ideas flowing, expand your skills, and, if you like, share your work with a community of like-minded designers. No customer feedback, no revisions, no risk. Just pure creative freedom.
February’s Boom Brief asked our community to do something seemingly tricky: brand an independent florist. Anyone who’s struggled with underwear like this knows how easy it is to fall into clichés – spindly text, a palette of blush and sage, predictable petal patterns. We want to see better things. Our community definitely did.
Our fictional business Petal & Stem was founded by two best friends who quit their day jobs to follow their passion for seasonal British flowers. No imports, no filler flowers: just flowers that are being grown now. The brand needed to feel warm but not cute, independent but not amateurish, modern but rooted in nature. Under the hashtag #cbbriefpetallandstem, designers from London to Budapest, Paris to Warsaw are bringing something truly different to the table. Here are the items that are stopping us in our tracks.
Folk craft meets pixel art
The most conceptually adventurous work comes from Swedish graphic designer and illustrator Josefine Jälmevik. Rather than employ an overt visual language, Josephine compares the two crafts of floral art and embroidery. Both are communal, tactile and generational; traditions are passed on through hands, not manuals.
Josefine’s central logo takes the form of a pixelated decorative pattern that references cross-stitch and folk pattern making, with a subtle digital undertone that keeps it from feeling purely nostalgic. The two figures gather around a wildflower at the heart of the design, representing the store’s founding friendship. Pair it with a bold, confident wordmark that highlights the sophistication of decorative details.
Tissue paper, packaging and stationery are all decorated with a lace-like stencil pattern made from the logo. Branding gets people to pay close attention…and that’s exactly the point.
PS changes everything
Perhaps the most emotionally resonant entry came from Kansas City-based marketing and creative director Kate Ross. Her concept hinges on a quiet but brilliant observation: the acronyms for Petal & Stem are P and S. Of course, a PS is what you write when you can’t quite bring yourself to say the most important thing in the body of your letter.
From this starting point, Kate built an entire tonal world around the idea that flowers often express things we find difficult to put into words. Her campaign slogan – “PS I love you&” – runs like a thread through her entire identity, appearing on wrapping paper, ribbons, gift boxes and aprons. The ampersand at the end does something clever: it leaves unlimited space for whatever the recipient needs it to represent. The brand will speak for you so you don’t have to.
Kate also built a community dimension into the brand story: every purchase comes with a loose stem that can be kept or passed on to a stranger. It’s a small gesture, but it turns every transaction into an act of connection, which is exactly what the brief called for.
Blooming ampersand
Art direction student Lancelot Bercot-Duflos, currently completing his master’s degree at ECV Paris, has his identity centered around an elegant idea: the ampersand is a living thing. Using the Gaya font (chosen for its organic, curved font and references to the earth goddess), Lancelot designed a logo in which the top loop of the & opens into a flower, while the lower curve stretches out like a stem. This is a beautiful typographic thought.
This identity leans toward what he calls a “naïve” approach to design: hand-drawn illustrations with visible brushstrokes, deliberately free of polished floral clichés of perfect typography and swirling calligraphy. His color palette was drawn directly from British seasonal flowers, and one detail is particularly noteworthy: both of the shop’s founders have their own colors on their business cards, taken from opposite sides of the color wheel. Two people, one brand. It’s a small touch, but a lovely one.
seasons in symbols
London-based senior designer Satvir Sihota made the fateful decision early on: replacing the ampersand with a plus sign. The reasoning is brilliant. A plus is neatly divided into four quadrants (one for each season) with different palette colors representing the flowers that are in bloom at that time of year. Narcissus yellow in spring, lavender in summer, burnt orange in autumn, and cold white in winter. It’s a system that’s both logical and fascinating.
Since then, Satvir has developed each seasonal flower into a vector illustration that perfectly fits the brand’s graphic style. The P in Petal has a distinct petal shape, which she developed into independent marks and repeating patterns.
The result is a logo that’s truly consistent across wrappers, business cards and branding materials, and a concept that reveals more meaning the longer you look at it.
Grow from scratch wordmark
Spanish studio Leyma Design, founded in San Sebastian by Leyre San Miguel Iribar and Matthew Townsend, uses a printing approach rooted in restraint and craftsmanship. Their central move was to design a custom ampersand that subtly transforms into a flower: not an illustration addition, but a transformation of the letterform itself. It’s elegant, disciplined work.
Around this wordmark, they built a flexible visual system: a set of British wildflower illustrations that serve not as decoration but as a structural graphic layer across packaging, stationery and social content.
Photography is shot using natural light, texture, and soft focus to match the seasonal, untouched quality of the flowers themselves. Serif fonts and an earthy and warm color palette keep everything grounded. This identity feels like it truly exists on the street.
Typography as flower arrangement
Budapest-based graphic designer and typeface artist Laura Sásdi found her concept in the typeface itself. By aligning the two T’s in “Petal and Stem” as the stem of the flower, she collapses the boundaries between typography and botanical illustration into a unified mark. This idea sounds obvious once you see it, but it takes a special typographic sensibility to spot it in the first place.
Other brand assets extend the brand identity into a set of wildflower icons with different petal shapes and colors, drawn from the diversity you actually find in British wildflower fields, rather than a florist’s catalogue. Each feels different but clearly belongs to the same family, bringing a happy, garden-like energy to the system without descending into chaos. Laura’s stated goal is an identity that is both professional and joyful, and the balance she strikes between those two things is what makes her work possible.
scarlet tulips and quiet confidence
Meanwhile, Warsaw-based designer Kseniya Matusevich draws inspiration from an unexpected source: the book Why women need to grow upa collection of honest stories from women about their relationships with gardening. Her feelings about the brief were immediate: the flowers were carefully assembled and grown by two female friends who had a deeper understanding of their craft.
Her answers were shortened and considered. Clean sans-serif wordmarks in Figtree (organic, serious and friendly) are paired with a simple symbol that unites petals and stems into a single connected form. Vibrant scarlet and calm off-white tones are presented intuitively. She had a bouquet of fresh scarlet tulips in her kitchen at the time, and their centers had turned a pale buttery yellow. It shows: this sense of identity is lived in, not engineered from a distance.
The ampersand that brings everything together
Amsterdam-based brand consultant Romario Dudok van Heel, who founded strategy-led studio NOTGOOD last year, took a quote from the brief and applied it: “The energy of a Sunday morning farmer’s market combined with thoughtful, confident design”. The tension between warmth and restraint underlies everything that follows.
His concept centers on the “&”, both as a typographic element and as a visual metaphor. Custom drawn so that the letters P and S are subtly embedded in the form, it also echoes the gesture of the stems coming together…the connection rendered as a single mark. Since then, Romario has developed two logo variations: a compact P&S monogram for smaller applications and a full wordmark for more expressive use.
However, the ampersand sign does more than just appear in names. It becomes a flexible graphic device that wraps around objects and interacts with floral arrangements, while patterns derived from its structure flow organically through wrappers, packaging and printed materials. The color palette, meanwhile, pairs deep botanical greens with brighter, fresher tones – rooting the brand image in nature while remaining contemporary. The typography uses Displaay’s Reckless font, a calligraphy-derived serif with closely spaced characters, creating a quiet intimacy that reflects the friendship at the heart of the brand.
It’s an identity built on less, not more, and it’s all the more powerful because of it. Another great article submitted to our monthly Boom Briefs.
How to participate
Looking through all these entries and submissions to each challenge, we were struck by how the same brief could lead in such completely different directions. Florist profiles can generate a lot of the same content. Instead, it produced folk embroidery, homely illustrations, typographic transitions, seasonal symbolism and quiet botanical restraint. This range is the point. You can view the identities presented here in full via the hashtag #cbbriefpetallandstem.
Are you frustrated that you missed this? No worries: Boom Brief #8 is out now! Head to our Instagram @creativeboom for full details and how to get involved. No pressure, no expectations. Just you, a prompt, and the freedom to make something that didn’t exist before.
