Aperture: A Brand Identity From Scratch
A visual identity built from nothing: a lens mark constructed on a grid, a six-color palette, a type system, and usage rules written for people who aren't designers.
- Client
- Aperture (concept brand)
- Role
- Brand Designer
- Year
- 2026
What I did
- Wrote the design brief: positioning, personality, deliverables
- Logo mark, construction grid and animated reveal
- Six-color palette and Sora type specimen
- Usage guidelines: clearspace and do/don't rules
- First-pass layouts generated with Figma AI from my brief, then redesigned by hand
A startup with a name, an idea, and nothing to look at. The brief was an identity that could hold up from a 16px favicon to a dark-mode app, with rules clear enough that the team could use it without asking a designer first. Five deliverables came out of it: the animated mark, its construction sheet, the palette, the type specimen and the usage guidelines.
Key decisions
Every proportion of the mark comes from a 100px construction grid, so anyone can redraw it exactly.
Instead of eyeballed proportions.
Clearspace is measured in iris radii, a unit taken from the mark itself.
Instead of a pixel measurement that breaks when the logo scales.
Usage rules shown as do and don't pictures.
Instead of rules written only as sentences.
Results
- Brand deliverables
- 5
- Palette colors
- 6
- Clearspace unit
- 1× iris
Concept project: Aperture isn't a real company, so there's no adoption story to tell. These numbers describe the identity itself, and each one is visible in the deliverables on this page.
A mark built on a grid
Aperture is a camera word, so the mark is a lens: a violet iris around a warm amber center, with one segment cut to suggest the blades of a shutter. It's constructed on a 100px modular grid: an outer boundary circle, the opening at its center, and six blades with a 120° overlap. Every proportion comes from that geometry rather than from eyeballing, which is what makes the construction sheet worth having. Anyone redrawing the mark later can rebuild it exactly.
Six colors, each with a job
Ink for text, three indigo-to-violet shades for the brand surfaces, amber for the one thing on a page that should catch your eye, and Mist as the light background. Amber is deliberately the only warm color, the same idea as the lens's lit center: one spot of warmth in a cool field.
Type that matches the geometry
Sora for display and headings: a geometric sans whose round letterforms echo the circles the mark is built on. On the dark specimen it holds its weight at large sizes without turning heavy, which matters for a brand whose app would run in dark mode.
Rules anyone can follow
The clearspace rule uses a unit taken from the mark itself, one iris radius, so it scales with the logo and nobody has to measure in pixels. The do and don't examples show the mistake people actually make, a washed-out or recolored mark, next to the right version, because a picture of the wrong thing gets followed more reliably than a sentence about it.
What I'd change
The guidelines contradict the brief. The usage page says the mark always sits on Paper or Mist, and forbids desaturating it, yet the brief asked for a dark-mode app and the logo reveal itself plays on deep indigo. So the system needs two things it doesn't have yet: a reversed version for dark backgrounds, and a single-color version for embossing, one-color print and the places full color can't go. I'd also give each of the three purples a written role. Three close shades with no rule for when to use which is where an identity starts drifting.
Want to talk about this work?
I'm open to UX/UI and product design roles, and happy to walk through any of this in more depth. I'll usually reply within a day or two.