Bō - Art of Bonsai

Bō is a French avant-garde collective who are creating the world’s first and finest curated collection of exceptional bonsai trees. Dedicated to the preservation of the ancient art of bonsai cultivation, Bō offers its clients a bespoke delivery of rare and sublime living works of art (bonsai trees). They use non-intrusive, state-of-the-art technology to optimise the care and maintenance of trees in the collection and encourage their development wherever they are installed.

By harnessing the possibilities afforded by the Internet of Things (IoT), Bō's custom-designed bonsai pots include an array of sensors that measure the tree’s local environmental parameters and, using artificial intelligence and forecasting data, are able to predict the precise actions required in terms of soil nourishment, watering and re-potting.

Owners and delegated custodians are able to interact through a dedicated mobile application, receiving alerts, should the need arise, as well as being accompanied to perform specific tasks. A one-to-one concierge service supports the client’s investment by providing advice and support at distance, or directly at the point of installation. The dedicated team of bonsai masters helps to sculpt and develop each specimen to render each work of art truly sublime throughout the years.

The Bō Brand Book

One of the major deliverables of this branding project involved the creation of a bespoke, limited edition Brand Book to be offered to new members. Created as a strictly-limited publication, this hand-stitched brand book featured custom photography, French and English copywriting, special inserts and overlays, custom papers and special ink finishes.

The bonsai photo shoot was held in winter when the featured maple trees had lost their leaves naturally in accordance with the season. We wanted to preserve all of the beauty of the bare branches, but also convey the experience of a tree in full bloom. We accomplished this by adding a semi-translucent paper insert with a digital foliage over-print as a transition page, thus preserving the true splendour of the tree, while reflecting the natural lifecycle of growth. Technological aspects were explained using specially commisioned, hand-drawn illustrations in an ink style, to preserve the spirit and flow of the book.

Flexibility meets finesse

The extended graphical system for Bō was inspired by another ancient Japanese art called suminagashi - a method that uses "sumi-e" inks dropped carefully onto a still water surface and then blown or manipulated into delicate forms and swirls. The resulting designs are then picked up by laying a sheet of white rice paper over the ink covered surface.

We felt that the once-in-a-lifetime, uniqueness of suminagashi art closely was a perfect complement to the timeless but dynamic beauty of each bonsai tree. With this in mind, we set about creating and extracting an entire library of graphical forms using a custom, machine-learning based algorithm to generate unique variations. These were used in a large range of applications, from business cards to web and application design assets. With an infintely customisable system, the designs could also be adapted for derivative products such as fertilizer.