Rebranding
Automata Studios

Established in 2006, Automata Studios has grown from a partnership between friends to a staff of 10 creative minds. We have been fortunate to work with a long list of internationally recognized brands creating unique experiences and building amazing things.

Over the past year we have been actively working to aim our creativity at ourselves to make our organization as innovative as our projects and allow us to “level up” into even bigger and better things. As part of this transformation we made our first full-time design hire with the addition of our Creative Director, Anthony Carlucci. It is his explicit goal to extend our capability and inform the other facets of our business with a design perspective.

One of Anthony’s first projects was to revisit Automata’s branding and make it reflect who we are now and where we see ourselves in the future. He interviewed everyone at the company. He reviewed eight years of clients and projects. He then compiled that information, and through a process as detailed and painstaking as every line of code we write, he turned that data into a brand that truly represents us and what we do.

We recently published the results of this process on our website and on our social media presence. Now, we invite you to see into the process behind the new brand. What you’ll find below is a written version of the presentation that unveiled our branding internally. We want you to see the care and creativity we applied to re-thinking our brand.

I hope you enjoy. Please reach out to us with any thoughts, or to see if we might work together on bringing your ideas to life. We look forward to hearing from you.

Branden Hall

CEO, Automata Studios

Objective

Build a vibrant visual brand for Automata Studios to reflect the innovative and dynamic work we do. Integrate and embody design thinking in our business. Create a sense of wonder, and enable us to work iteratively over time while speaking from a unified voice.

Solution

Employ a visual system that is flexible and responsive. We’ve created a generative framework for future experiments and conceptual sandbox for our exploration of dynamic digital experiences.

Logotype

The logo itself is a unified triangular form which suggests at the “A” in our name, and represents the 3 facets of Automata Studios; Technology, Strategy, and Design.

The unlikely expression of this geometric form relates to the perceived magic implicit in bringing technical experiences to life. It is a nod and a smile at the seemingly impossible things technology can do. We aim to bring to mind alchemic symbols, mathematical notation, and molecular structure.

This visual identity will serve as a framework for our many generative, procedural, and hardware integration experiments. It acts as a conceptual vessel for our ideas in interaction and experience design.

We’ve taken a responsive approach in creating this mark, authoring an elegant flexible system which enables us to scale up or down for various applications from tiny icons to large sculptural signage.

Typography is light clean, geometric and fresh, employing the typeface Sharp Sans which offers a crisp humanist take on the modernist classic Futura. The type communicates clearly, flexibly, and gives the right mix of scientific and approachable details to reflect our values.

The type is set in optically matched or drastically contrasted pairings which enable us to create a lightness or hierarchy at any scale.

Color is approached by broadening our spectrum from what once was pure red to a glowing field of deep reds across the color wheel to a rich purple.

Our positioning and brand as it relates to our clients remains one of integrated thinking and innovative perspective on the possibilities of creative technology. We are a creative partner singularly focused on making amazing things for the best companies, and we have pivoted our brand to greater reflect that priority.

Thank you. Have a great day.