SatoshiLabs – Visual Style Story
🌟 As Marty Neumeier says, the only sustainable competitive advantage is to be different. Recently, I stood in front of the challenge of how to make the SatoshiLabs brand stand out.
Their old identity was just black & white 🖤⚪ and since it’s a holding of 4 companies, each of them had its own brand visual style and color – not exactly matching.
The new brand identity was supposed to cover them as an umbrella ☂️, but not hide them. It should strengthen their individuality, instead.
I was searching for the way 🧭, how to manifest the individuality of all these companies in a way that unifies them. I was experimenting with creating a brand new material for 3D models in Spline, that would use all the brand colors of SatoshiLabs subsidiary companies at once. I went through as many concepts as you can imagine from the rainbow 🌈, dual tone ☯️, dreamy–like 💭, hallucination-like 🌀, iridescent ✨, … you name it, that could potentially work.
The real breakthrough came at the moment when we wanted to unify the online appearance with offline printed materials 📲🖨️. Yap, printed materials never shine and change colors when moving as the online did. What now? Discard the whole concept and start from the beginning? Of course not!
What if we didn’t print it, but use a holographic foil for the effect? Yes! That’s it! The only problem was that the foil looked miles different from the current online visual effect, so I grabbed the foil and reverse-engineered the holographic foil effect into the online ✨. There was no tutorial, nobody had done that before me. I mean in the static of course, but never for the interactive 3D used in a web environment 🌐. That was the “different” I was looking for. That was the “different” the brand needed.
After a week of playing with lights 💡 and materials, I came up with a 5-layer holographic material that behaved exactly like the foil when moving. YES!
The holographic material is now the new unifying brand element 🔮, which can be extremely easily used on any object both online and offline, holding the SatoshiLabs idea of strengthening individuality.
We managed to differentiate SatoshiLabs in the world of millions of copies 🌍. We created a uniquely recognizable identity that is trustable because of its authenticity 🙌. So the community and culture around the brand can grow! 🌱🚀
