We’ve never found an easy way to connect creative collaborators we love with projects we hear about. So we made something we’ve always wanted to use: a vetted network that connects creative experts with creative projects. Culturae is our humble attempt and the first of many studio experiments.

Brand Positioning
We built the brand around one purpose: to diversify expertise. Diversity, abundance, and plurality became central to everything we built, from the brand’s visual identity to the selection committee.

Naming
Our brief was a name that spoke to the diversity of cultures and experiences within creative expertise. The chosen name Culturae (pronounced cultur-ray) combines “culture” with “æ”, the Latin suffix for plurality. The URL and social handle addition of “Labs” is to imply a space for experimentation.

Verbal Identity
We collaborated with creative experts to build a verbal identity that simplified and codified the Culturae story. Because we had a range of audiences, our verbal identity was flexible enough to adapt and strong enough to stay consistent.

Visual Identity & Website Design
Our visual execution needed to be distinctive enough to recognize, but simple enough to complement a range of expert profile content. The mark was a continuation of the name's inspiration, speaking to identity and the shape of a fingerprint. The color palette came from one of the biggest features people wanted to know: expert availability. The result was a system that made it easier to discern important information, then dive deeper from there.

Designing Culturae as a social web platform started by looking at the best profile design: from dating sites. We tested a bunch of our prototypes with users, both those with projects and those wanting projects. Those insights helped us streamline our product and focus only on the features that mattered most to our network.

Advisory Board
Johann Diedrick, Christopher Taylor Edwards, Teri Kaplan, Evan Lee, Jackie Lim, Meghan McCormick, and Sandy Kyin.