Vessel Studios :: Branding, Web Design, Marketing Assets

Thirteen Years of Making Science Look Like Art

We'll shortly be launching the fourth version of the Vessel Studios website, the latest chapter in a partnership that goes back to Vessel's founding in 2013. That makes them one of our oldest clients, and the story of how it started is worth telling. Our first meeting was in a record store.

Side A

Criminal Records, Little Five Points, Atlanta. Thomas Brown was flipping through vinyl when we arrived, and for the first hour we barely talked about the project. We talked about music. What we were listening to, what we grew up on, the albums that shaped how we think about our own work. Thomas is a drummer and a visual artist as much as he is a scientist, and it was clear he was looking for collaborators who cared about craft the way he did.

Vessel didn't exist yet. There was no team, no reel, no clients, just Thomas, a name, and a conviction about what medical animation could be. He was Chief Creative Officer at Nucleus Medical Media at the time, where he had built their animation department and gotten a wide view of a field full of technically excellent work: anatomically precise, scientifically rigorous, and tired. Lighting and story were afterthoughts. Thomas believed medical animation could be treated as cinema, that a mechanism of action could be lit and scored like a film without losing any scientific accuracy. This was a real bet. Pharma is a conservative industry, nobody was asking for artistry, and the safe path was to keep delivering the standard look. He left anyway, founded Vessel, and gave us a deceptively hard brief: build a brand for a company whose entire premise is that science is art.

The Mark

How do you design an identity for a studio that renders the invisible? Vessel's subject matter lives below the threshold of human sight. Proteins, receptors, cell walls. Their gift is bringing that hidden world into view.

We sketched close to a hundred concepts before narrowing to the five we showed. There was a V that swayed as if underwater, a V built from particles, a V traced from the veins around the heart. We abstracted a red blood cell. We tried electric circuits and test tubes. Plenty of them were nice, and each one failed the same way: it committed to being either organic or precise, when refusing that choice was Vessel's whole reason for existing.

The concept that survived was inspired by the concept of putting something under a microscope slide, that moment when the two pieces of glass touch and everything spreads out organically, that growth in channels, branching strokes, that's the concept. The execution was much more restrained though, we kept the letterform legible and clean.. Thomas would later describe the studio's mantra as "simple and elegant." We feel our logo is a good reflection of his values.

Thirteen years later, that V is still the logo. Vessel has moved states, grown its team, and expanded into six service lines, and the mark has never fundamentally changed, because it was built on the company's founding premise rather than on what logos looked like in 2013.

The Living Brand

The identity has held still for thirteen years; the website is where the brand grows. The concept from the start was a living, breathing world, an unobtrusive layout that lets Vessel's animations take over the screen so that every element of the design ties into their storytelling. Each of the site's four versions has expanded that world a little further, showing off new environments as the studio added illustration, motion graphics, sound design, and virtual experiences.

The site quickly became Vessel's main source of new business, and Thomas tells that story better than we can:

"Since we've launched the Vessel website, our main source of marketing comes from Google search results. By the end of its first year, our website had ranked on the first page of search results, blowing us past companies that have been in the business for over 30 years. More importantly, the first bid request we've received turned out to be one of the biggest cancer drugs of all time."

The bet on artistry paid off. Vessel became known as the studio elevating a tired field, and today Pfizer, Lilly, Merck, AstraZeneca, Amgen, and most of the other big names in pharma come to Vessel when they need to show how their science works.

Then there's the V itself, which became the kind of mark a client actually champions. Every year Vessel has us reinterpret it. So far that's around a dozen original artworks and shirt designs, sent to clients as gifts and handed out at trade shows.

Side B

Vessel and Condensed are built the same way: small on purpose, five to ten people, no plans to get bigger. It means the same people who sketched the V in 2013 are the ones designing the fourth website today. That website launches soon. Here's a first look.

[sneak peek coming soon i promise]

Like everything Vessel does, it gets out of the way and lets the science be beautiful.

"Working with Condensed is like having an in-house graphic design team. They carry the weight of the projects and exceed my expectations; they tell me their ideas and show me things they've made for me. In simple words, Condensed is an authentic company. They have people who love what they do; they simply happen to make a living out of it."

– Thomas Brown – Founder Vessel Studios

Vessel came to us before they had a single client. Thirteen years later, we're still making new things together.

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