Atoms
During the busy holiday season of 2021, I joined Atoms, a NYC-based sneaker start-up, full-time as their Senior Designer to plan and execute all graphic design tasks. I completed a rebranding of the entire company, branded a new shoe model, lead creative direction for marketing campaigns, instituted the design system for digital projects, and much more.
Hero image photographer: Julien Roubinet︎︎
The old logomark in place before I joined Atoms was an interlocked series of loops reminescent of a sacred geometry pattern called “flower of life” — pretty, but, a little complicated and many folks confused it for an icon of a flower. It also was nearly invisible on new outsole materials due to the strokes of the circles not having resilient scalability. In the new logomark, I simply “atomized” the old mark down to the essentials: dots. I wanted it to move from what seemed like a diagram of a part of an atom (the nucleus) to a very minimalist, pluralized abstract of what you might think atoms to be: swirling dots.
The full Atoms logo incorporates a modified version of Helvetica Now for the logotype. I wanted the tails of the lowercase “a” and “t” to be flatter — to look more like two feet of differing lengths (because this was an early value proposition of Atoms; you could order two different sized shoes since most people’s feet are actually not identical in length). I altered the “o” into a perfect circle on its exterior to match more with the logomark, and to feel just a bit more open and geometric.
With the new logomark being dots, we also had the option to render it “in void” — that is, hole-punched in various materials. This ensured that it was more visible on places like the bottom of the shoe. I also wanted to make the mark symmetrical; the logomark can be imprinted in dirt or sand without fear of it being flipped.
Alongside the logo, I focused on elevating the brand’s typography. I commissioned the Very Cool font foundry to finish VC Garamond Condensed (which would have remained incomplete had I not reached out) and then utilized it as Atoms’ primary headline typeface.