Eyebeam
Charting a bold vision for the future of social justice
How can design support the intersection of tech and humanity?
What we did
Industries
In the years leading up to their 20th anniversary, Eyebeam had grown from a space for artistic experimentation to a multidisciplinary nonprofit pioneering social justice through the intersection of art and technology. Today, it hosts a flagship residency program, provides boundless educational resources, facilitates community engagement, and more.
But their visual identity was limited in its ability to represent and speak to the scope of the organization and the significance of its work.
So, together with Mother Design, Eyebeam sought to build a new brand that could contain, communicate, and unify the many dimensions of their organization while charting a bold vision for their future.
The Organization
Artist-led creation for the public good
Eyebeam was established in 1998 by John S. Johnson as a resource for artists to engage creatively with technology in an experimental setting.
By radically centering artists in the cultural conversation, Eyebeam gives them the support to both interrogate and re-imagine what technology can be and who it is for.
In order for Mother Design to define the brand and carve out insights that would inform the visual identity, we dove deep into understanding what it’s like as an artist or practitioner to engage with Eyebeam.
What we learned was a powerful, but challenging, provocation: being a part of Eyebeam feels like “being inside of the internet.”
“Being a part of Eyebeam feels like ‘being inside of the internet.’”
The Eyebeam experience is also deeply communal, as a diverse family of artists and advocates cross paths within the organization.
This combination of futuristic exploration with connection and humanity was our key inspiration point for an entirely new visual identity system.
The Logo
Creating a logo for Eyebeam meant designing a sort of conduit—a container for an infinite number of outcomes and initiatives. Due to the intensely visual nature of the platform, a logo for Eyebeam would need to hold its own. The result is a wordmark that constantly morphs to fit new contexts and spaces, employing geometric letterforms that allow the E’s and B’s to stretch.
To represent the role of the organization as a dimensional container of unlimited content, we created the “frame” device: a dynamic construction of multiple wordmarks that link conveniently through rotated, interchangeable E’s and M’s.
The Typography
Eyebeam Sans
Eyebeam Sans is built on an open-source font called “Work Sans” by Wei Huang and Google, Eyebeam Sans uses an Open Type feature called 'Contextual Alternates' to create a playful, random selection of letters in text.
a typographic manifestation of the tension between man and machine; it’s an algorithm that randomly distribute characters, creating a unique, bespoke typographic contrast.
Built on an open-source font called “Work Sans” by Wei Huang and Google, Eyebeam Sans uses an Open Type feature called 'Contextual Alternates' to create a playful, random selection of letters in text.
It is a perfect tension between human and inhuman that puts typography in a constant state of flux.
Eyebeam’s Leading New Media Artist award
air up
Defining a whole new way to taste
Although it exists mostly in black and white, the brand world is accompanied by a set of primary colors. The saturated red, green, and blue represent the building blocks of all digital images.