Working with Simulon was one of those shots in the dark that ended up working out. They had reached out years back when I wasn't ready for something full-time, and with the memory of a gold fish, I cold reached-out to the founder on Twitter years later expressing excitement in the work they were posting, and how I was keen to work together on 'something'. Such is life as a gold fish, but serendipitous all the same. Long story short, I came on to trial with them as a Head of Design, with my first initiative to redevelop their branding.
While I didn't remain with Simulon post-trial period, they were great to work with, and I feel like I created some of my more interesting branding to this point with their encouragement to push the bounds (something I relish hearing). Simulon exists at an interesting cross-roads of what's real and fake, and they very intentionally blur the lines between the two as best they can. As a creative, this presents a lot of interesting challenges and exciting opportunities to explore and push the bounds. I worked with them in developing several brand directions, and ultimately created a brand system I was very proud of, but one that they ultimately chose not to move forward with.
From the jump, the duality and convolution of what's real or not in a scene offered an exciting opportunity from a design perspective. It lends itself to a lot of different opportunities when thinking about the branding foundations and how those could potenetially be expanded upon to the broader brand system. There's a lot of clichés with branding in this space, but there felt like opportunity to do something a little more unexpected.
Given the world in which Simulon operates, as mentioned, there's a lot of interesting visual concepts to explore. At the same time, there are many visual tropes to avoid– the obvious plays on 3d cubes come to mind as tacky, and painfully unoriginal at this point. While I still felt there was ways to create unique visuals around the idea of an isometric 3d cube, my primary direction steered away from that. I was more keen on what the app was really about– bringing imagination to life in a cinematic context. Breaking that down to the most base elements, I went back to the idea of how people use their hands in 2 'L's' to add framing as if they were filming. This distillation felt very appropriate as it didn't overtly contextualize Simulon as a 3D company, but one that empowers one's imagination, through the vehicle of 3D scene integration. In further exploring the concept, I also discovered ways to lean into having those L's resemble an 'S' for Simulon, and have elements of that 3D cube.
While there was a fairly strong consensus on the main direction, there were lingering doubts about fully committing to an 'early' idea. While we all felt that the above direction was conceptually strong, I still felt some of the other concepts had legs to run somewhere interesting given the opportunity. Because of this, while I was expanding the primary direction, I was also exploring alternatives based on the previous work, and new input pointing in different directions.