Human-first
Almost every brand wants to feel human—which is to say, brands want to be perceived as caring about humans and serving them well. But feeling human is uniquely challenging, even elusive, in the tech world—as we see within many tech brands’ failed attempts to trade in cultural coolness. It would seem like this challenge shouldn’t be so challenging; after all, humans understand innately what resonates as authentic and what is just cosplay. (It’s one of the reasons why our spidey-senses tingle at bad AI.)
Being human is not restricted to our physical bodies or even what we pay attention to. Being human is about shared environment, gravity, natural light, tactility. There is no replacing this definition of realness with simulated reality. The larger consuming public, for now at least, has largely rejected simulated environments. We don’t want to wear headsets to gaze at virtual landscapes or to purchase invisible objects. IRL is irrefutable truth in the face of tech fantasy.
San Francisco is obviously saturated with tech brands, vying for attention, and not just the attention of the average consumer, but that of engineers and founders. That is why there’s an unapologetic weirdness to how cryptic some tech brands sound when they craft external messaging to support their brands. Advertising in Silicon Valley is also a recruitment tool: perhaps the average consumer doesn’t care about deployment speed, but ambitious engineers might. Consumers may care about new features in already-popular digital products, but they’ll ignore products they’ve never heard of, whereas founders are constantly vigilant. They’re all in competition with one another. The ads are just as much for them as they are for potential enterprise clients.
Boutique strategy
Understanding the strategic environment of an industry is crucial when you’re designing for it. When boutique VC firm Human Capital engaged us at Saturday to develop a new brand identity, we took the constraints of typical tech and leveraged them. The numerous advantages this firm has to offer ambitious founders naturally run counter to what everyone has gotten used to. This was their unique opportunity.
Human Capital’s founders understand that their competitor VCs often trade personal service for the allure of scale. But young tech founders looking for funding that will help them scale need a lot of guidance, not just cash. HC wanted to demonstrate their superior offering at every level, beginning with their office space, a gorgeous former-bank on Market Street in the heart of San Francisco.
Our creative team developed the identity in parallel with its brand expression. We designed a sleek and minimal logo but warmed the monochrome palette so that it felt less backlit on screens. The typography is similarly clean and minimalist, but far less ubiquitous than the fonts typically and lazily used over and over again in the tech world.
Once the identity project was well underway, I also engaged with the team to design their beautiful new office interiors. We helped select furniture, colors, tile, surfaces, even the art on the walls—all to underscore the brand’s approach to real humans interacting with other real humans, even when the common interest is digital products.
I directed an on-site photoshoot with photographer Nick Fancher, where we captured beautiful black and white portraits of the entire team at a time when other firms remain perpetually remote. We also shot the city itself: the everyday commute, the inspiring architecture, the reflections of glass and fountains. These are the truly human encounters that matter; they’re the pictures of life as it is actually lived.
