Responses by Casey Martin, founder and executive creative director, Play.
Background: Lumafield, an incredibly powerful desktop CT scanner and software that makes 3-D imaging accessible and affordable, lets engineers literally see inside products in all three dimensions without taking them apart. With Lumafield, engineers can more easily analyze designs for costly or dangerous flaws to make products safer, higher quality and less expensive. So, the brand came to us to create an identity capable of building trust with a skeptical hard-science and engineering audience while still making the technology feel anchored to everyday needs, emotions and values.
Design thinking: Because its CT scanner opens new worlds of possibility for engineers, we wanted to brand Lumafield as a pioneering disruptor but one that’s still expressive, approachable and trustworthy. To get there, we did exactly what the scanner does: we looked within ourselves for inspiration but also to the colorful visual language of 3-D imaging.
For the logomark, we wanted to express the three-dimensional x-, y- and z-axes in 2-D. So, we did and created a dramatic crosshairs effect in the process. The logo is supported by both the wordmark and typography, a type family called Monument Grotesk that invokes a sense of technical knowledge as well as honesty and trust. We landed on the tagline “Look Within” to unite the whole system, which succinctly echoes Lumafield’s whole technical and emotional proposition.
Challenges: Resisting the urge to step inside the scanner. It’s so cool.
Just kidding! We work with a lot of tech companies, so working with Lumafield presented a challenge we often find ourselves facing: how to take incredibly complex technology and distill it down to a simple, original visual identity.
New lessons: Branding and design can inspire trust in new technologies by clearly and genuinely expressing that technology’s benefits. Companies like Lumafield are solving some of the world’s most complex problems, and the distillation of those complexities into easy-to-digest morsels is essential to helping people share its optimistic vision for the future.
Visual influences: By directly referencing and utilizing the vibrantly colored scans produced by the platform, we championed the beauty of transparency—both literally and figuratively. This was a moment for the design to leverage a lot of what makes Lumafield so cool. We leaned heavily on Lumafield’s 3-D x-ray scans and prismatic color palette, using before-and-after imagery to demonstrate the simplicity of the technology while infusing it with a burst of emotion.
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