Crafted aesthetics for a moving world.

Overview

A Vancouver brand, seen everywhere.

Herschel Supply Co. was founded in 2009 by brothers Jamie and Lyndon Cormack. It has grown into a globally recognized lifestyle brand, known for its clean, timeless backpacks, travel goods, and accessories.

With roots in Vancouver and a footprint in over 100 countries, Herschel blends function, fashion, and a spirit of exploration. It occupies a rare position: a hometown brand operating at global scale, where every piece of material has to work in a hundred markets at once.

Burst partnered with Herschel to enhance their visual assets, developing a refined icon system and contributing to the creation of high-impact print materials that align with the brand’s design-forward identity.

The Challenge

Match a language already fluent.

Herschel’s visual language is minimal, confident, and long established. Anything added to it has to belong.

That is a harder brief than it sounds. A brand with a strong system gives a designer very little room: the constraints are already set, the tolerances are tight, and any flourish reads immediately as foreign.

The work called for design that disappears into the brand rather than announcing itself: icons that read as Herschel’s own, and print that holds the same restraint across a hundred pages that the brand holds on a single product.

This was never about giving Herschel a new look. It was about extending the one it already had.

Strategy

Precision, then purpose.

Burst studied the existing system before drawing anything, working from its proportions, weights, and habits rather than around them.

Every deliverable was measured against the same test: would this sit beside Herschel’s own work without drawing attention to itself? It is a test that rules out most good ideas, which is the reason it works.

The same discipline carried across formats, so that what was made for print and what was made for screen came out of one set of decisions rather than two.

Icons

Crafting the icons.

Burst developed a custom icon set tailored to Herschel’s visual language.

Each icon was carefully crafted to match the brand’s minimalist style, with clarity, balance, and usability as the governing constraints. At icon scale those three pull against each other constantly, and resolving them is most of the work.

The set was built as a family rather than as a collection, so the pieces share a weight and a logic and can be extended later without the seams showing.

The result is a cohesive collection of brand-aligned visual elements designed with precision and purpose.

The Catalogue

One hundred pages, perfect bound.

Burst’s designers assembled a 100-page perfect-bound catalogue for Herschel Supply Co., featuring premium finishes including foil stamping and spot varnish.

Clean, minimalist layouts hold the range across the full length of the book. A catalogue is a test of endurance for a layout system: it has to stay interesting for a hundred pages without ever changing its mind about what it is.

The finishes were chosen to be felt rather than seen. Foil and spot varnish register in the hand first, which suits a brand whose products are judged the same way.

The catalogue blends product presentation with visual storytelling, resulting in a print piece that is both practical and aspirational.

Photography

A sense of place.

To capture the essence of the brand’s lifestyle and tone, Burst produced professional imagery from remote regions of beautiful British Columbia.

The locations do real work in the book. Herschel’s products are built around travel and exploration, and photographing them where that actually happens gives the pages a claim that a studio backdrop cannot make.

The imagery brings a sense of place, adventure, and authenticity to every page, and reflects the brand’s utilitarian aesthetic without staging it.

The Impact

One brand, across print and screen.

Herschel gained a cohesive icon system that extends its visual language rather than competing with it, and a catalogue that presents the range with the finish the brand is known for.

Burst also supported the brand’s digital presence, so the iconography and the storytelling stay consistent across both print and web.

Print and digital tell the same story, in the same voice, at the same standard, which is the whole requirement for a brand recognized in more than 100 countries.

In Closing

Craft, at global scale.

A brand recognized in over 100 countries stays recognizable through discipline: the same decisions, made the same way, every time.

Work like this is judged by how little it draws attention to itself. The measure of success is that the icons and the catalogue read as Herschel, not as something added to it.

Burst’s work with Herschel was an exercise in that discipline — quiet, exact, and built to hold.