NODE

Inspired by Pentagram’s Vertical, MOUTHWASH Studio’s Air Company, Stockholm Design Lab’s Polestar, and PORTA ROCHA’s Robinhood, NODE explores what happens when identity behaves more like infrastructure than branding.

NODE started as an exercise in restraint. I wasn’t interested in making something louder or more expressive. I wanted to see what happens when an identity behaves more like a system, a program—something that exists to orient, support, and disappear when it’s doing its job well.

The work pulls from aerospace hardware, surveillance imagery, and industrial interfaces and tooling. Places where design isn’t decorative, but necessary. Where clarity matters. Where everything earns its place.

Visual language is stripped back and deliberate: reduced typography, pixelated artifacts, atmospheric gradients, and utilitarian surfaces. The palette is controlled. The pixelated “N” functions less like a logo and more like a marker—a signal that repeats, adapts, and connects rather than announces itself. Every element is treated as a node—part of a distributed network where meaning emerges through context, proximity, and restraint.

NODE isn’t meant to explain itself.

It’s meant to sit there, quietly doing its work.

thumbnail by Ash Thorp