The Wombles return with a new brand by How&How

The much-loved children's TV show The Wombles is back on our TV screens with a refreshed identity, as well as a full character and illustration toolkit, by London and LA-based studio How&How.

The furry characters have returned over 50 years after the first episode aired in 1973 with a renewed sense of purpose: to champion sustainability, a love of nature and the importance of community more than ever before.

For those who aren't familiar with The Wombles, they are creatures that live underground, collecting and recycling human rubbish and, since its initial run on the BBC between 1973-75, it has been repeated many times by the likes of Cinar Films (1998), Channel 5 (2015), and most recently Altitude Television.

When The Wombles team started to think about getting a new look and feel, they reached out to How&How, which has experience working with clean-tech and sustainably-focused brands.

"We actually couldn't believe it at first. It was surreal…in a good way!" says the studio's founder, CEO and executive creative director, Cat How. Excitement rippled throughout the How&How slack channel at the prospect of working with such a cherished brand, and the added sustainability angle made it even more appealing.

How playfully refers to The Wombles as "the UK's original environmentalists" and was glad to hear that the Wombles team wanted to "refocus the narrative once again around this core truth of the characters". Since The Wombles have stayed true to their resourceful, sustainable roots since the beginning, the project was all about resurfacing their story of turning trash into treasure and leveraging it in a contemporary way.

With the show celebrating 50 years of being on screen, it was the perfect time to consolidate everything under a refreshed brand identity.

As there was so much source material spanning several decades, How says one of the biggest challenges was "trying to distil something which felt truly 'Wombly' through a contemporary lens, but which still felt true to the original brand from the 70s". Like many creative challenges, it was tough but rewarding, particularly when working on the characters themselves, according to How.

She explains how the design process involved "working out whether it was the 'droop' or a nose, the texture of the fur or the way the mouth was placed", which felt "truly Womble, but still new". The new Wombles identity features recognisable icons, patterned pictograms and illustrations derived from a vast bank of source material that How&How scanned and documented at Wombles HQ. How says: "This provided a rich base for our collage patterns, as well as helping us work out the themes which emerged most often to determine what was truly 'Womble'."

How&How also developed a mascot icon with Brooklyn-based animation and illustration designer Remi Sorbet in three levels of fidelity for merchandise tags, as well as an extensive illustration toolkit for each of the characters. This included props, fabric designs and specific colour palettes for each Womble.

How describes how these elements came together in "a rich, eclectic tapestry across the brand".

Like the visual identity, The Wombles brand already had a collection of well-known taglines and existing catchphrases, which the studio repurposed for the new identity.

"I loved how the creation of this rebrand in many ways mimicked the cut-and-paste nature of how the Wombles approach old content and find 'treasure'. Where they reclaim, polish, and patch it up into something new," says How.