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Emulate is an energetic company pioneering a new era in human health through the power of organ-chip technology. Through a combination of biology, design, and engineering, Emulate has developed the Human Emulation System, which gives researchers unprecedented abilities to recreate the human microenvironment for the purposes of understanding how disease, drugs, chemicals and cosmetics affect our health.

The Emulate team came to us motivated to evolve and deepen their brand language, while also building a new website with a robust infrastructure that could scale with their business. The ICS team was also tasked with expanding the existing Emulate visual language by creating a sleek, modern, and responsive website to better communicate the benefits of Organs-on-a-Chip, and create a hub for their digital marketing efforts. 

The result is a future-driven and engaging experience for visitors that elevates Emulate’s brand and reputation as a leader in the organ-chip space. The ICS team expanded upon Emulate’s visual language by layering in elements like biological microscopy details, along with glass-like transparency effects reminiscent of Emulate’s transparent organ-chip technology, introducing visual depth and elegance that connects the biology to the product. We designed content to be accessible and immersive by using custom animations, illustrations, and narrative-style page layouts to provide more opportunities for storytelling and a more captivating path to understanding the power of Emulate’s technology.

Our Role

• Logo
• Brand Identity
• Content Strategy
• UI/UX Design
• WordPress
• Creative Partner

Industry

• Biotech & Life Science

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Our creative digital designers and strategists worked closely with Ginkgo Bioworks’ stakeholders (founders, scientists, designers, and strategists, to name a few) to help build the brand that put synthetic biology on the map and created a whole new category in biotechnology. We started with a quick iteration to meet a tight deadline, and continued to expand and evolve their digital brand over the following years. 

Read below to see how ICS and Ginkgo worked together on the Grow Magazine, Concentric by Ginkgo, Creative Residency, and Syntheticbiology.com.

Our Role

• Logo
• Brand Identity
• Content Strategy
• UI/UX Design
• WordPress
• Creative Partner

Industry

• Biotech & Life Science

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Finding solutions to climate change takes collaboration, innovation, scale and community—and Greentown Labs is uniquely positioned to meet that challenge.

As longtime partners of Greentown Labs, ICS created a brand built around the collective awe and bridge building needed to foster, develop, and commercialize climate solutions. The website is where startups, corporations and partners come together to learn how to take climate action that matters. From creating a welcoming user experience that showcases Greentown startups to making event signup intuitive and seamless, the Greentown Labs brand leads with a sense of community and belief in what we can achieve together.

The brand and website are built with growth and flexibility top of mind. And the site has scaled as Greentown has grown from a Somerville-based incubator to a national climate tech leader with multiple locations. We oriented that growth around a brand architecture that allows new programs and services to have their own distinct look and feel but also connect back to the Greentown Labs parent brand.

It’s climate action at work.

Our Role

• Logo
• Brand Identity
• Content Strategy
• UI/UX Design
• WordPress
• Creative Partner

Industry

• Biotech & Life Science

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ProFound Therapeutics, a Flagship Pioneering company, tackles the grand challenges of biology by exploring the vast frontier of the dark proteome to uncover therapeutic proteins that will transform medicine.

Our assignment was to present a brand that operates at the highest level of biotech, to show the elegance of their deep and innovative science, and to ground ProFound’s exploration through the visual introduction of the ProFoundry Platform. The site employs abstracted landscapes and terrain-like details as a way to visualize Profound’s exploration of uncharted scientific territory. The unexpected color palette aligns with Profound’s sophisticated science and creates a sense of visual elegance. We complemented the more abstract visuals with a scientific visualization of the ProFoundry Platform that introduces users to a diverse pipeline of revolutionary medicines. The site as a whole creates a sophisticated experience that aligns with a company that is revealing a vast new frontier for the biotech industry.

Our Role

• Logo
• Brand Identity
• Content Strategy
• UI/UX Design
• WordPress
• Creative Partner

Industry

• Biotech & Life Science

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Akouos develops gene therapies with the potential to restore, improve, and preserve high-acuity physiologic hearing for people who live with disabling hearing loss. They serve a wide spectrum of audiences—patients, investors, clinicians, advocates, and more, through three flagship points of entry: the Akouos website, the Sing Registry (a global longitudinal observational study), and Resonate (a program to improve genetic testing).

ICS was challenged to create and build a brand that allows each separate digital experience to stand on its own but also tie back to the Akouos brand as a whole. We used color and repeating visual motifs to connect each digital space while creating a custom look and feel for each.

Our Role

• Logo
• Brand Identity
• Brand Architecture
• UI/UX Design
• WordPress
• Creative Partner

Industry

• Biotech & Life Science

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Auregen publicly launched at the end of 2023 but had been in stealth mode for over six years. They partnered with us knowing that brand-building and story-telling would be critical to establish themselves in a crowded and mature industry. 

We created a brand and visual language that embodies a bold, futuristic, and natural feel that balances Auregen’s bioregenerative science with the humanity that it serves. 

In crafting the brand, our designers created distinct themes, each contributing to a unique visual identity. We used subtle, calming movements to infuse select pages with motion that is fluid, engaging, and hypnotic. This detail is selectively integrated across the site to enhance high-impact pages and create a dynamic user experience.

Auregen’s commitment to human tissue engineering inspired the exploration of 3D bioprinted scientific renders. Realistic depictions of human tissues coexist with abstract layers, textures, and refracted colors to avoid the sterility often associated with generic 3D scientific visuals.

To counterbalance the scientific illustrations, organic biological textures come into play. Exploring the use of textures resembling organic ink blots, we aim to mimic the appearance of cells, new life, and webbed connections. One-line illustrations introduce a human element without relying on stock photography and mirror the line work of a 3D printer, creating a distinctive aesthetic.

Auregen’s visual language is punctuated with a spectrum of “kaleidoscopic” colors, introducing saturated tones paired with warm and restrained tints. This combination aims to create depth, and an inviting, approachable brand personality that steers clear of clinical and cold color palettes.

As Auregen progresses in clinical trials, we anticipate the inclusion of candid patient photography alongside their unique stories, providing a more comprehensive visual narrative.

Our Role

• Logo
• Brand Identity
• Content Strategy
• UI/UX Design
• WordPress
• Creative Partner

Industry

• Biotech & Life Science

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While many biotech companies focus on drug discovery from outside the body, Empress Therapeutics, a Flagship Pioneering company, approaches drug discovery from within. Their unique approach is built on its proprietary platform that canvasses an overlooked source of important pharmacology: the human body. 

To support this approach and standout in a crowded field, we created a messaging strategy that differentiates Empress from the sameness of biotech messaging, refreshed the existing brand while maintaining key elements to maintain brand equity, and built out their website to not only attract investors, partners and peers in the near term, but to also create a runway for a future buildout focused on clinicians and patients. 

The visual brand conveys a bold, vibrant, and energetic feel that reflects Empress’s unique personality. It conveys a spirit of discovery and efficiency, and reflects Empress’s cutting-edge goal to uncover selective starting points for drugs within the human body. We maintained the brand’s core building blocks — the Empress green and dot motif – and added new elements, leveraging human imagery and a targeted use of motion elements to bring depth and engagement to the overall visual experience.

The visuals align with a messaging strategy that focuses on the innate curiosity and potential that can be found by looking within the human body. This overarching strategy creates multiple messaging lanes where Empress can highlight the discontinuous advancements of its Chemilogics^TM  platform, the use of human chemistry to find prequalified and privileged drugs from within, and its systematic exploration of the metagenome to surface therapeutic opportunities and new medicines. 

Our Role

• Positioning & Messaging
• Brand Identity
• Content Strategy
• UI/UX Design
• Creative Partner

Industry

• Biotech & Life Science

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Octant came to us with a challenge: how can we partner together to showcase Octant’s powerful but hard-to-explain technology through their brand and digital experience? And how can we present the company as fresh, cutting-edge—and importantly fun—without alienating their highly-educated core users?

Our discovery work surfaced throughlines that inspired our designers and strategists. Courage is at the heart of Octant.

The company’s foundation is built on taking risks that others aren’t willing to take. We paired the idea of courage with their inspired name, Octant. This intentional reference to mapping the unknown aligns Octant’s core science and technology and their approach to company culture. The brand expression of these themes creates an exciting and energetic digital experience.

Our Role

• Logo
• Brand Identity
• Content Strategy
• UI/UX Design
• WordPress
• Creative Partner

Industry

• Biotech & Life Science

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Growing from a first-mover startup to an industry-defining biotech company of the future necessitates evolving a brand while holding true to its original ethos.

Generate:Biomedicines partnered with us to expand its brand and website, showcasing to the biotech community that what was once considered science fiction is now a reality. We achieved this through a year-long buildout of content around their Chroma model, Generate Platform, and Pipeline.

The Chroma story began with ICS designing a blog post about the vast potential of their de novo protein-generating AI and culminated in a full-page buildout that validated the technology. As an unapologetically scientific company, Generate is committed to sharing this breakthrough with the larger scientific community. The Chroma page provides links to an API and model weights where scientists can develop their own de novo proteins.

The model is part of a larger strategy focused on maximizing its platform for impact and creating a pipeline of life-changing medicines. ICS worked closely to develop a platform page that would use existing elements of the brand to visually represent the power and potential of the continuous loop platform to increase the speed at which therapeutics are identified and validated. The success of the platform has resulted in a deep pipeline in multiple therapeutic areas which we designed to immediately show its depth.

The brand relies on visually stunning images of proteins presented through a minimal brand palette to highlight the potential of what comes next.

Our Role

• Brand Identity
• Content Strategy
• UI/UX Design
• WordPress
• Creative Partner

Industry

• Biotech & Life Science

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Shape^TX was founded with the mission to make programmable RNA medicines available for everyone. They will accomplish their mission by leveraging the power of AI to upend traditional drug discovery.

Shape^TX’s mantra is as simple and elegant as it is bold and resolute: We let data be our guide. With that in mind, we built a bold and beautiful brand that matches Shape’s ethos.

Our design team employed fluid, abstracted, and organic shapes that demand a sense of motion and flexibility. This plays with the very notion of the concept of “shape”; rather than a rigid, formal visual shape, we’ve created a language of fluid forms that speak to Shape^TX’s flexibility, scalability and possibility.

This phase one site is purposely sparse—it’s not for the faint of heart or casual visitor. This is a site built to intrigue those in the know to want to know more.

Our Role

• Brand Identity
• Content Strategy
• UI/UX Design
• WordPress
• Creative Partner

Industry

• Biotech & Life Science