Selkie: a seaweed brand with its own tartan

Seaweed Farming Scotland is a family business that grows seaweed on ropes in the shadow of Lismore Lighthouse. It needed a brand people could buy from a shelf: a look, a voice and a reason to pick it up.

The name comes from the neighbours. In Scottish folklore a selkie is a seal in the water and a person on land, slipping between the two by shedding its skin. That felt right for a food that makes the same journey.

From the sea to the kitchen, without losing what it was.

The work covered the strategy, the logotype, a colour scheme and a tartan. Packaging was next, and it never happened.

The logotype is an arched serif, the sort of lettering you’d find on a harbour wall or a tin that’s been in the family for years. For a family firm, it had to look like it had always been there.

The typeface is Drummond, and I chose it for its name as much as its letters. Drummond comes from the Scottish Gaelic drumainn, meaning “from the ridge” or “high ground”. A name with the land in it, for a brand that comes from the sea.

It has one trick. The S is changing. Its foot has already become a seal’s tail, and the rest of the letter is on its way: a selkie caught halfway between one thing and the other.

There are three lockups. The first is the name alone. The second adds Rope grown in Scotland on a curve beneath it, and the third adds Est. 2018 between two fronds of seaweed. At small sizes the S goes back to being a letter, because a tail you can’t read is a smudge.

Selkie’s personality maps onto four archetypes. The Caregiver, the Sage and the Magician lead; the Explorer adds range, and keeps a traditional brand curious.

A Scottish food brand with a tartan is hardly a new idea. Tins and tins of shortbread will back me up on this. A Scottish food brand with its own tartan is a different thing: a pattern nobody else can use, built from the brand’s colours, that can wrap a jar or line a box and say “Selkie” without a word.

I went deep on tartan to get there — deep enough to write a whole post about it. Clans wore their colours to say who they were. Brands do the same thing with a logo and a palette. A tartan does both at once.

Some tartans have travelled a long way from the Highlands. A regiment’s, a clan’s, a fashion house’s, and one registered as recently as 2025. A few of them are on the rail below, keeping Selkie’s company.

The sett is simple on purpose. Two equal blocks, green and near-black. A stripe of mint through the green. Then one thread of yellow running one way through the black, and one of pink running the other.

One thing I love about digging into new learning is how logical and creative worlds collide. In this case it was how tartan is noted as a threadcount — and how that can be managed in code. Every tartan can be written as a short line of letters and numbers, and I wanted a tool that turned that line into cloth and back again. So I built one. The Tartanator is free, and it exists because of this project.

The colours come from the view on the way out to the farm. Kelp green and Sea Foam do most of the work: the crop, and the water it grows in.

The two accents are from the cliffs. Heather pink and Gorse yellow, both seen from the boat. In the tartan they’re the two threads you notice last and remember first.

Deep Water, a green so dark it’s nearly black, holds it all together.