Space Punk - A New Visual Language for Filecoin

Overview

The Filecoin brand had been laid like train track ahead of a moving train: enough to keep going, never quite complete. With Filecoin Onchain Cloud arriving and filecoin.io due a redesign, the gaps became urgent. The brand needed to reach past early adopters to a more pragmatic audience, and it needed the tools to work as an ingredient brand — something the ecosystem could put on its own products, the way Intel Inside did.

Approach

The visual work needed less consensus building than the strategy did — the team was recognised as the expert here, so it was a matter of presenting the idea well. Once the senior people in the ecosystem were on board, the rest snowballed.

The methodology was a deep dive into Filecoin’s past, preserving what was good, then filling the gaps with thorough research and iterative design.

The power of a deep archive

We started with an audit. Three Figma files of every expression of the Filecoin brand from the previous five years — events, merchandise, the websites, the bootleg stuff people were selling on Redbubble — so we could see what already existed and pick out what was worth keeping.

Open source typography

Typography came first. The brand font was proprietary with an expensive licence, which meant asking the ecosystem to either buy it or quietly break the rules. We tested widely and landed on three open-source typefaces: free to use commercially, open to contribution and modification, and flexible enough that different parts of the ecosystem could find their own expression within them.

Astronomical colour

Good colour palettes already exist in nature, which is why they work on us. We found the most compelling ones in space imagery. So the system keeps Filecoin blue for continuity, and builds out from it with accents and gradients drawn from astronomical phenomena — more range to work with, and a reason behind each choice.

Space punk: science at scale

Looking for a look and feel, we researched brands with a similar personality and kept arriving at science brands. They want to be forward-looking, pragmatic, collaborative and open — the same four things the strategy asked of Filecoin. We called the aesthetic that came out of it space punk.

Space punk runs on a few principles. Clean Swiss typography with a bit more flavour than before. Negative space used to create scale and show the relationships between elements, because Filecoin is a physical, global network with ambitions past this planet. Astronomical bodies as circles at different sizes, interacting — something the branding had been doing for years without saying so. And colour and gradient as the interaction of light and physics.

None of it is arbitrary. The aesthetic carries the personality the strategy asked for, the scale communicates the scope of the mission, and the whole thing stays continuous with earlier generations of Filecoin design — right back to the interplanetary file system the project came from.