Quantum physics - and I’m going to make a big understatement here - is quite weird. If you’ve ever tried to engage with it as a topic, you’ll have discovered that it contradicts what you thought you knew about the fundamental nature of stuff itself. Particles literally appear and disappear in this world; sometimes, because you’re looking at them. You might also know that quantum holds the key to the next huge leap in computing, by tapping into that fundamental weirdness and using it to do calculations.
This is a thought that never quite left us when we were asked to rebrand Universal Quantum, a leading firm in the race to make usable quantum computing a reality. Can we capture that weirdness? Sure, we can do the branding thing of establishing what the company stood for, what differentiated it, how it is seen by its audience and how to connect to them, and putting that all into lovely visuals. But what if we could design a logo that itself appeared and disappeared?
Here’s the new logo. Have a good look, and then let’s take it apart.
The UQ logo is made up of blocks that reference scale. Making a quantum computer is easy [citation needed] but making one that operates at sufficient scale to bring any real value is - understatement again - hard. No-one has in fact managed this. UQ have a brilliant solution, which involves a way of connecting simple (again - this is a relative thing) quantum processing units together again and again until you get to the desired scale. So you can see that influence in the logo.
Then in between the blocks you’ll see the optical illusion. When we drew out the blocks as a rough idea, we spotted it. There are dots that seem to appear in the space between the corners of the blocks. And when you really look at them, they disappear. Just like our quantum particles.
We think this is the first purposeful use of an optical illusion in a logo to describe a feature of the product. (It’s hard to find this out for certain - if you know of another, get in touch). Exactly what is going on here is quite hard to understand and indeed is not fully agreed upon. But the illusion is called the Hermann grid, after a nineteenth-century German physiologist and (strangely) speech scientist called Ludimar Hermann, who was the first to describe it.
In the development of this work, we actually went quite deep into visual illusions. There’s another grid, the Ehrenstein grid, which creates dots in a different manner; we also explored moiré, the effect of close lines crossing over one another.
But the Hermann grid won out. It’s disarmingly simple, but with an element of surprise weirdness that feels right for the subject matter. It became the core idea for all of UQ’s new design system, a constant reminder of what’s inside the machine. It lives harmoniously with our new proposition for the company - “solve scale, change world” - which again is disarmingly simple but contains UQ’s enormous ambitions for their technology.
Having worked on a number of branding projects now, I’ve found that what really matters is curiosity. Technology and science are areas that we as a team are greatly interested in - see our other clients [link to science page] - and I’m of the belief that this interest and curiosity pays off in the final product. Growing, founder-operated companies almost always have something special there, be it in the tech or story or mission. We’re keen to do more work in this area, so whether you’re in startup phase or building on initial success, give us a shout. Weird or not, we’d love to chat.