Shaping Culture, Pixel by Pixel

By: Atley Kasky, Brand/Design

We recently rolled out a rebrand.

After five years sharpening our thesis and proving its viability, it was time to match Collab+Currency’s expression with our ambition. Shifting from an identity crafted circumstantially to one that reflects a little more purpose.

With that said, we didn’t want to overthink it, so we simplified our approach to identifying what makes us unique and what we care about.

While crypto has been primarily financial in nature, that’s not what gets us most excited about what we do. And it’s certainly not where we’ve deployed most of our capital.

No — what gets us most excited are the social and cultural endeavors. The ideas at the intersection of community and technology.

The projects that shape culture.

It’s baked into our moniker, so this likely isn’t a surprise — but we wanted our visual identity to better reflect our emphasis on collaborative cultural outcomes driven by new technologies.

It became obvious to us to really lean into the plus in Collab+Currency.

It just worked on so many levels to capture concepts we see as core to our position: inclusion, convergence, summation, creation, extension, augmentation.

The plus itself is built from a square pixel, or bit. A base form we use throughout the site and other applications to create procedurally generated clusters meant to be a playful (but not overly conceptual) take on transformation and renewal.

Starting with the pixel allowed us to play with another concept that we feel is important not just to Collab+Currency, but web3 in general.

We’re collectively in the middle of a transitional moment where, for the first time ever, we get to rethink and rebuild parts of the internet that weren’t working, and improve the parts that were.

With that in mind, we wanted to honor where we’ve been, celebrate how far we’ve come, and create space for where we’re going. To do this, we played with the idea of fidelity. The wordmark has moments of reduction, where letterforms revert to simpler shapes while sitting next to more refined and precise curves.

Last but not least, we also felt it was important to capture our personality and spirit. We wanted the site to be exploratory and discoverable, so there are some fun easter eggs throughout that we encourage you to uncover. This part we’re still working on, because we’re trying to approach our work, the brand, and this site not as a monolith — but a perpetual work in progress.

Just like us.

You can find more thoughts from our team on Twitter @Collab_Currency.

You can learn more about our work at www.collabcurrency.com.