Terrafuse Brand Identity Refresh

Founded in 2018, Terrafuse is a startup building machine learning models to predict climate catastrophes and extreme events.

I worked with the CEO and Director of Strategy and Operations to update their visual identity, website and pitch decks, providing brand assets, guidelines and templates.

The high-level goals were to further legitimise Terrafuse in the eyes of customers and investors and to position them as a scientific, progressive and reliable option in their market.

Using the findings from the discovery session, we came up with some guiding principles for the brand identity. The brand would embody a “creative scientist” persona, with science at the core but a sense of humanity and a love of nature. Rather than inundating customers with highly technical language, we would seek to demystify and help the customer understand what can be a very complex space.

With our strategy in place, I mocked up a few rough directions to help us find our way visually. The directions were well received but there was a little tension in terms of how much we wanted to differentiate versus provide something familiar to the target audience.

We thought the concept of a vortex was a good metaphor both for the way climate events happen and for the way AI systems pull in vast data to a centralised repository. Faktum, a typeface with contrasting square and round elements, felt like the perfect balance of scientific and humanistic properties to be the main text face.

The resolved logo is a simplified vortex mark that keeps the energy of the more radial experiments while being more ownable for Terrafuse.