In a world so reliant on countless products, tools, electronics and equipment, manufacturing remains one of our greatest challenges. Especially as these products and technologies become increasingly complex and sophisticated, there is an urgent need to diagnose problems faster and more efficiently. Facing this challenge with their groundbreaking CT scanning technology, Lumafield partnered with design and branding studio Play to create a brand that embodies beautiful possibilities of its platform, promoting understanding and engendering trust in the products and tools we use every day.

Lumafield democratizes access to a key engineering technology – CT scanning – which allows engineers to literally see inside of products without taking them apart. It combines hardware and software solutions and AI-powered deep learning with the ambition to become a universal debugger for a range of physical products and technologies – analyzing designs as well as finding costly or dangerous flaws so that products are safer, higher quality and less expensive. With their brand, they needed to build trust with a skeptical hard-science and engineering audience while still making the technology feel human and approachable.

To do this, Play worked to capture the essence of Lumafield’s character, personifying it as both a ‘soulful futurist’ and a ‘charismatic disruptor.’ Thinking of the brand like a character helped us shape our visual concepts,” explains Play Founder/ECD Casey Martin. “We wanted to brand Lumafield as a pioneering disruptor but one that’s still approachable, human, and trustworthy.”

With this foundation, Play set to work developing the strategy, brand identity – including logo, color palette, typography and art direction – and website design and development. For the logo mark, Play designed a flattened isometric shape of the XYZ axes, fixed in the crosshairs of precision and rigor. This is supported by both the wordmark and typography – a type family called Monument Grotesk that’s designed to invoke a sense of technical knowledge as well as honesty and trust. Even the tagline “Look Within” unites the system by echoing Lumafield’s technical and emotional proposition.

However, much of the unique spirit of the branding and design is also owed to the aesthetics of the technology itself. By directly referencing and utilizing the vibrantly colored scans produced by the platform, Play was able to champion the beauty of transparency, both literally and figuratively. “This was a moment for design to really leverage a lot of what makes Lumafield so cool,” adds Martin. “We leaned heavily on their 3D x-ray scans and prismatic color palette. Using before and after imagery to demonstrate the simplicity of the technology while infusing it with a burst of emotion.”

For Martin, Lumafield’s branding not only showcases Play’s ability to supply the world’s most innovative companies with equally innovative brands, but design’s larger role in clearing a path to a world that lives up to its promise. “Branding and design can inspire trust in new technologies by clearly expressing that technology’s benefits in human terms. Companies like Lumafield are solving some of the world’s most complex problems, and distilling these complexities into easy-to-digest morsels of inspired content is a testament to the transformative power of design. To be able to play a role in communicating Lumafield’s vision has been incredibly inspiring and we can’t wait to see where that vision takes them.”