Over the last year, we've been developing a brand identity for an unusual client – ourselves. Internal branding work is hard to do when the group is busy, but we all felt that the studio deserved something uniquely expressive of our vision.
Let's take a look at the process. 🧵
After talking with @wolftivy, we concluded that there was an opportunity to create a new aesthetic for print - a beautiful artifact that people could share with friends and pass down to future generations. The result was a physical edition of @Palladiummag.
Feb 21, 2024 · 7:57 PM UTC
Over the last 3 years we've designed 12 issues and had the pleasure of working with visionaries likes @Grimezsz and @isabelleboemeke. The Palladium network is filled with brilliant individuals, and we've expanded to work with many of them.
FF >> 2024 and we've built an agile and interdisciplinary studio working on branding, web design, print and architecture with clients like @reserveprotocol, @midjourney, @lab_dao, @ProsperaGlobal. The founders we've met have been as inspiring as the companies themselves.
Our own identity was largely faceless – a "design collective" with no website and no logo, named after one of sci-fi's greatest literary authors and united only by an image of the Voyager Golden Record.
Our challenge was to design something that resonated with each of us.
Our internal rebrand started with this focus. Why had we selected the Golden Record as an icon of our shared beliefs? What did this seemingly vintage object mean to us "non-engineer, non-physicist" design people?
Launched on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977, the Golden Record is now the furthest man made object from earth. Its engravings communicate a collective compendium of human history– our culture, our science, and our progress in the form of images and audio recordings.
The drawings on its face detail an astonishing amount of information– an understanding of the laws of physics, instructions for playing the record, and the location of our sun relative to nearby pulsars. It tells the story of human civilization. piped.video/watch?v=5bOzhebL…
We believe this fascinating object is one of the most sophisticated and beautiful objects ever designed by humankind.
So we started there: how could we incorporate it's design into our identity?
A balance needed to be struck between being faithful to the record's diagrams but also communicating simply and clearly. We also wanted the design to be more independent– more our own. We decided that it would be best to isolate one of the diagrams as the AC mark.
We gravitated towards the pulsar map as a symbol, conceptually for its map function and visually because of it's radiant quality– to us, it can be interpreted as a radiating star, or an illustration of time passing from the perspective of an object traveling in space.
When designing our new wordmark, we wanted something that indicated our affinity for working with future facing clients with a nod to midcentury science fiction.
The goal was to land somewhere exciting, avoiding the flavorless monotony of sans-serif style agency identities.
For our symbol, a proportional logic was developed to instill a sense of order and relation between the strokes of the pulsar map. We rigorously pursued this idea of a canon, or system of measurement between elements, throughout the logo.
In the design space, we frequently hear outsiders describe the details or end product as something "that people might not even notice." One might view the Golden Record this way, aimlessly traversing space, never to be seen or used by humanity. What's the point?
This nihilistic take foregoes the most sacred aspect of creativity: when one creates, it is with the belief that you are building something beautiful and good. The story of what is beautiful and good is deeply meaningful– it stands the test of time. This is our aspiration. 🧵
If you're a founder who is committed to building a more inspirational human civilization, in biotech, defense, industrial technology or culture, we'd love to chat with you. DM us and check out our work at asimovcollective.com