Cyn:Lr Laboratories
Identity for a robotics lab building arms that can pick up objects they have never seen. The capability is invisible, so the brand had to explain a way of seeing.
Context
Cyn:Lr, short for Cybernetics Laboratory, works on visual object intelligence: robotic arms that can handle unfamiliar objects in any orientation without being trained on them first. It is sometimes called the holy grail of robotics. It is also very hard to show in a photograph, because what matters is what the machine understands, not how it looks.
The founders wanted an identity that matched the ambition of the engineering and reflected a culture built on precision. They were clear about what they didn’t want: the familiar robotics look of dark screens, cyan light and implied menace, which said nothing true about how they work.
Approach
We started from the company’s values before any visual work. One came up in almost every conversation: clarity. It became the test for each decision, and anything that couldn’t justify its place was taken out.
The identity is built on two kinds of sight meeting at a single point, human and machine. The colon in the name carries it, drawn as a rounded square and a circle, one for each way of seeing. A forward arrow is folded into the wordmark.
- Cybergaze, the wordmark, and Cyberglimpse, a compact mark for small spaces
- A tagline, Not so obvious
- Three colours: Cyn:Blue, Cyn:Violet and Cyn:Magenta
- Three pattern systems: Cynetic Vision, Cynetic Moiré and Cynetic Flow
- Collateral, environmental graphics and digital applications
The identity had to work for two audiences at once: investors trying to understand a technology they couldn’t see, and engineers deciding whether to join. After the rebrand, Cyn:Lr raised a $10 million Series A in November 2024 and grew from 60 to 120 people.
Learnings
Most of what I learned here came out of the client conversations. Gokul, who founded Cyn:Lr, had a strict and specific picture of what he wanted, and getting to it meant reading a lot of nuance in how he talked about the company and cutting through to what he actually meant and felt about it. There was a lot of push and pull. It is what made sure the design came out strong and also held the place it needed to hold in the founder’s heart.