Making the Extraordinary Understandable

During a recent conversation on the Craft & Crew podcast, I was asked a question that designers are often expected to answer.

“What’s your dream client?”

My answer surprised the interviewer.

I said I didn’t have one.

Not because I lacked ambition, but because after more than thirty years in design, through Pentagram, Apple and Mucho, I have learnt that the quality of the work has very little to do with the fame of the logo on the door. Some of the biggest companies in the world can be incredibly difficult to work with, while small organizations with a clear mission can become career-defining. For me, the dream has never been about landing a particular client. It has always been about working with intelligent, humble people who genuinely wanted to collaborate and who believed design could help move their organization forward.

That was before Biotic.

Working with Biotic isn’t exciting because it’s another branding project. It’s exciting because of what sits behind it. Biotic is the organization stewarding the release of SpudCell, a milestone decades in the making. Their ambition goes far beyond introducing a new technology: to build a global community around it, ensuring that this breakthrough can be developed responsibly and benefit as many people as possible.

Every so often, a branding project comes along that calls for something much bigger: helping the world understand why something matters.

Before discussing logos, typography or colour palettes, we needed to immerse ourselves in the science. We spent time asking naïve questions, challenging assumptions and listening to the extraordinary team behind Biotic. We wanted to understand not only the breakthrough itself, but what it could mean for the future. The work of Dr. Kate Adamala provided the scientific foundation, while Drew Endy, Chris Raggio, and Jan Jedryszek are building an ambitious framework for how this technology could be stewarded for the benefit of everyone.

Only once we truly understood their vision could we begin thinking about how to communicate it.

One of the biggest misconceptions about branding is that it’s primarily a visual exercise. In reality, branding begins much earlier. It begins with understanding. If you cannot explain a complex idea simply, you probably don’t understand it well enough yourself. Our responsibility wasn’t to make synthetic biology look beautiful, but to make one of the most significant scientific stories of our generation understandable, approachable and inviting.

Rather than reducing the science, we focused on removing the barriers that prevent people from engaging with it.

Biotic isn’t trying to launch a product. It’s inviting participation. Scientists, researchers, educators, entrepreneurs and policymakers all have a role to play in what happens next. That required a brand capable of welcoming people into the conversation rather than intimidating them with complexity. The messaging needed to be optimistic without losing credibility, accessible without oversimplifying, and confident without becoming exclusive.