Here I want to give a huge shout-out to my brand identity mentor, Svyat Vishnyakov because his brilliant advice really paved the way to the result we enjoy now.
Below I’ll break down my work process.
Research
So, you want some inspiration for your next design project. The first intuitive thought might be to go to design resources like Behance, Dribble, or Muzli.
Right?
It used to be my go-to strategy, but in reality, you can’t create something original if you start with looking at how other people implement their ideas, skipping the exploration stage for your own project.
That’s why I stepped back and thought about our topic, industry, its origins, and related things.
I reflected this in my research.
The goal of the research is to examine the existing industry visuals and to find a special image that you can get your feet on and develop into an integrated visual system. So the brand identity has its strong core idea.
As I said, our domain is Intellectual property, namely — copyright. Thus, I divided my research into the following sections:
Picking up the idea
After a careful examination, I singled out several concepts that I wanted to build on.
In the first place, official papers (in part, patent certificates and so on):
They usually have a vivid, full-color folder cover, and generic, inner sheets with one accent color.
Other related papers are even black-and-white. And one thing that I want to particularly highlight is the dividers:
The next big topic is holography:
In its turn, it has various aspects: peculiar physics phenomena behind it, labs where such items are produced, the appearance of gradients, printed items. As for its graphic expressions, it’s sometimes combined with other security printing methods.
All was good, but it lacked unity.
The idea
I needed an umbrella idea as the main basis for these findings.
Where to pick it?
I should say that I used to follow this conventional path: if I need a graphic idea, I go to graphic design social platforms like Behance and Pinterest and browse everything connected with the topic-in-question. But in this case, I explore implementations but not the domain itself — thus, just can’t end up with something original.
This time, I did it the other way. Long story short, I studied the physical phenomena behind secure printing and recalled different sci-fi concepts about time, and it struck me.
So, the underlying technology of our product implies that the user creates a digital certificate that will exist forever, and can be accessed anytime.
In other words, something that had never existed before is created — and it will exist eternally.
Let’s assume that time is another dimension of space. It’s a concept, borrowed from H. Wells’s “Time Machine” and analyzed in Yakov Perelman’s “Mathematics Can Be Fun” book.
Then, let’s pick the simplest form to denote the certificate: a dot. And depict its being on a scale. And…
… we’ll get a line.
But it shouldn’t be just a static line all the time.
It can become bold:
And double:
And eventually, morph into backgrounds:
It can incorporate pictures and photos (and rotate, right?):
It can be made of letters or symbols:
By the way, when made of letters, it resembles security printing:
And who said that it should be straight? It can be dynamic, reflecting the message it carries.
Say, harsh zig-zags when talking about problems:
Or soft waves when describing neutral concepts:
And this became the glue that held together all the pieces of our product identity.
That said, let’s see the full picture →
