A New Visual Language & the Launch of FOC and Fil One

Space punk - around 400 generative pieces in one consistent visual language.

Overview

The strategy gave Filecoin a sharper position and a brand architecture; this phase gave it a face. Filecoin is not a company - it is open infrastructure for the decentralised web, run by an ecosystem no one entity controls - so the face had to work for everyone building on it, not for a marketing department. I built a new visual language for the brand - a visual concept we called Space Punk - and launched two ecosystem brands, FOC and Fil One, on it. The look had to hold at the pace of a growing ecosystem: a relaunched Filecoin.io, a rising volume of products and events, and far more illustration than a small team could ever produce by hand.

Approach

I rebuilt the identity around the space punk direction: an open-source type system, a palette drawn from the physics of light and scale, and a single illustrative world that could stretch across the whole ecosystem. Orbit - the architecture from the strategy phase - set where each brand sat: the core Filecoin brand at the centre, products, sub-brands and partners around it, so FOC and Fil One each launched with their own expression inside one system. A small brand team, an art director and a content designer with motion and contract designers directed in as needed, handled execution.

Orbit: where each brand sits in the system.

A brand nobody owns

Rebranding a protocol is a different job to rebranding a company. There is no CEO signing off the logo and no department that can enforce a style guide - the brand belongs to a decentralised ecosystem of teams who are free to take it or leave it. Compliance cannot be demanded, so adoption has to be earned, and that logic shaped every choice: open-source typefaces anyone can use without a licence conversation, prompts written as spec, guidelines built as working tools rather than rules. The system is designed so that using the brand properly is easier than drifting from it. Orbit set where each brand sits; the craft went into making sitting there the path of least resistance.

Space punk, made repeatable

Space punk only worked if it stayed consistent across all brand touchpoints, something difficult to achieve with a small team. So I treated the look the way the rest of the identity is treated: as a governed system. The prompt language that produces the aesthetic is written into the brand guidelines as spec, alongside the colour and type rules, and it runs on Midjourney. Anyone on the team can reproduce the style from it, so quality holds steady across a high volume of touchpoints as the ecosystem scales, without the look living in one person’s head.

Look & feel · Art direction — Space Punk: the cosmos as canvas, lit by vivid signal colour — nebula, galaxy, orbit and planet

Look & feel · Photography — cinematic, cool, deep blacks: earth from orbit and product photography

Color · Primaries — the Space-Punk accents: blue, purple, mint, orange, yellow

Color · Neutrals & Balance — black leads, accents signal: neutral ramp from black to white, one dominant accent per composition

Typography · Families — three families, one voice: Aspekta for headings, Funnel Display for accent copy, Funnel Sans for body, IBM Plex Mono for data

Typography · Scale — a major-third scale: base 16px, ratio 1.25, display at 76px through overline at 13px

The Filecoin network in practice — how data moves through Filecoin: user stores data, deal goes onchain, proofs verify storage, user retrieves data

FOC and Fil One launched inside the Orbit system - each with its own expression, each with a defined place.

Outcomes

The work shipped as a full redesign and relaunch of Filecoin.io, with FOC (Filecoin Onchain Cloud, filecoin.cloud) and Fil One (fil.one) launched on the new language and the Orbit architecture. It moved the ecosystem onto open-source typefaces anyone can license and use freely, and left behind a generative illustration system - one look, reproducible at volume - so quality holds steady as the ecosystem scales, without the team having to grow to match.