MilkNYC Cool

Creating an iconic, ever-evolving anti-brand

Way ahead of its time, MILK understood that community is key, and carefully fostered its own that encapsulated the effortless cool of Downtown NYC. Over the course of our 20-year collaboration, we’ve captured and reflected this creativity, culture and attitude through the brand as it has grown, diversified, and continued to redefine fashion content creation.

From its beginnings as a photography studio in 1998, MILK has spent the past two decades building a fashion empire and content-based creative company, as well as a following that would be the envy of many brands today. Headquartered in New York City, MILK came to epitomize the Downtown creative scene while empowering the industry’s most visionary talent and innovators. Base has been part of this evolution from the outset, working with the MILK team to consistently highlight their core values of creativity, culture, and hospitality.
From day one, the overarching objective was to create an incredibly iconic identity with a logo that functioned more as a symbol than as a word. In early applications, it took on a translucent quality – a reference to light and photography – before serving as a foundation for multiple adaptations.
The MILK ad campaigns were always about the creative content that was produced there, never the space or services. For the locations, our goal was to appeal to the location teams, a community with a very different vibe than the refined world of fashion. Here, we heavily referenced street, tattoos, and heavy metal.
As the company expanded its offering, we created unique visual identities for the various services that always tied back to the original. For MILK DGTL, a platform for film and print production, this meant playing with codes from the world of fashion and the tech startup industry. The MILK Gallery logo is animated to evoke the building’s row of iconic, pivoting glass doors, while for multimedia content team LEGS, we developed a modular logo as creative as the studio itself.
In 2010 we also completed the concept, branding, and creative direction for MILK Made – an online editorial platform that showcases emerging talents in fashion, music, art, photography and film. MILK Made’s raw, imperfect, ever-changing logo embodies the constant evolution of these creative disciplines, and the overall identity reflects the dynamism and edginess of the content published. This has since evolved into the MILK.xyz website and has become standard for popular culture and the arts.
MILK has been successful in each of its disparate endeavors because it developed a clearly defined – and then never compromised–its community, culture, personality and attitude. This in turn has created a pure brand synonymous with cutting-edge creativity that the next generation of MILK acolytes can appropriate and grow.

Way ahead of its time, MILK understood that community is key, and carefully fostered its own that encapsulated the effortless cool of Downtown NYC. Over the course of our 20-year collaboration, we’ve captured and reflected this creativity, culture and attitude through the brand as it has grown, diversified, and continued to redefine fashion content creation.

From its beginnings as a photography studio in 1998, MILK has spent the past two decades building a fashion empire and content-based creative company, as well as a following that would be the envy of many brands today. Headquartered in New York City, MILK came to epitomize the Downtown creative scene while empowering the industry’s most visionary talent and innovators. Base has been part of this evolution from the outset, working with the MILK team to consistently highlight their core values of creativity, culture, and hospitality.

From day one, the overarching objective was to create an incredibly iconic identity with a logo that functioned more as a symbol than as a word. In early applications, it took on a translucent quality – a reference to light and photography – before serving as a foundation for multiple adaptations.

The MILK ad campaigns were always about the creative content that was produced there, never the space or services. For the locations, our goal was to appeal to the location teams, a community with a very different vibe than the refined world of fashion. Here, we heavily referenced street, tattoos, and heavy metal.

As the company expanded its offering, we created unique visual identities for the various services that always tied back to the original. For MILK DGTL, a platform for film and print production, this meant playing with codes from the world of fashion and the tech startup industry. The MILK Gallery logo is animated to evoke the building’s row of iconic, pivoting glass doors, while for multimedia content team LEGS, we developed a modular logo as creative as the studio itself.

In 2010 we also completed the concept, branding, and creative direction for MILK Made – an online editorial platform that showcases emerging talents in fashion, music, art, photography and film. MILK Made’s raw, imperfect, ever-changing logo embodies the constant evolution of these creative disciplines, and the overall identity reflects the dynamism and edginess of the content published. This has since evolved into the MILK.xyz website and has become standard for popular culture and the arts.

MILK has been successful in each of its disparate endeavors because it developed a clearly defined – and then never compromised–its community, culture, personality and attitude. This in turn has created a pure brand synonymous with cutting-edge creativity that the next generation of MILK acolytes can appropriate and grow.