Minimalism is more than a look — it’s a lifestyle. A timeless reprieve from the overstated, Distillé is the élan vital of footwear. Every aspect is the absence of the unnecessary.

After years in corporate industrial design, the founder of Distillé wanted to break out on their own and bring their elevated expertise and sensibilities to the world of footwear. They engaged the studio looking for the brand architecture that would communicate their passionate design ethos and launch their beautiful product into the world.

Durham was approached to create the brand identity of Distillé, a modern and minimal-minded shoe company that values both function and beauty. Naturally, Distillé believes that the simplest designs require the highest level of sophistication, thus the brand decisions were made with the shoe’s minimal design approach in mind. Durham ‘distilled’ down the visual language to only what’s necessary— allowing the beauty of the ‘01’ shoe itself to shine.

Along with establishing a simple, yet refined typographic system and a beautifully neutral color palette, we included macro images and textures in the brand kit of parts that act as call backs to the raw materials used to build the shoes, as well as reference the environment of the studio in which these shoes are created – allowing the product’s perfect simplicity to speak volumes.