Ventori Technologies

Ventori makes routers and networking hardware for homes and offices in India. The category competes on specification, and it looks like it: angular plastic, gloss, rows of blinking lights. Most of these devices end up hidden behind a television.

The brief was an identity. The work became a brand strategy first, because the research kept pointing at the product rather than the logo.

The brand and industrial design teams did the research together, which set the tone for everything after. Three findings shaped the work.

• Indian homes change use through the day. One room can be an office in the morning, a classroom in the afternoon and a living room at night, so a device is always in somebody’s way.
• People want the benefits of connectivity without the look of it, the way they want electricity without seeing the wiring.
• Built in India carries quiet weight. It suggests a product designed for heat, unreliable power and dense apartments, and it doesn’t need to be shouted.

We wrote personas from observed patterns rather than demographics. Arjun, 34, works from a ninth-floor flat in Bengaluru where meetings run into the evening. Farida, 52, runs a design studio from a converted bungalow in Ahmedabad and had always treated the network as someone else’s problem. Kavita, 41, shares a Mumbai flat and one connection with three generations of her family.

The personas became the most used part of the project. Later arguments about features, finishes and copy were settled by asking what one of them would need, rather than whose preference won.

The strategy, called Seamless Presence, argues that a network device earns trust through restraint. It should belong in a room rather than hide in it. From that came three values written as decision filters, meant as much for engineering and support as for design: resilience, utility and predictability. The identity follows the hardware, with soft geometry, warm neutrals and very few signals, and the voice stays calm in a category that runs on anxiety about whether the thing will connect. All of it is collected in one document, The Ventori Continuum, written for the engineering and design teams to use together.

The personas arrived in the third week. They did more work than any logo route, and next time I would write rough versions in the first week and correct them as the research came in.