BACKGROUND

Indelible Planet was created as an innovation studio operating upstream from traditional agencies, interfacing directly with BMW leadership on speculative mobility programs. The studio needed a visual identity that could signal originality, intelligence, and conceptual range — without sliding into agency clichés or startup minimalism.

At the same time, the studio’s early projects required full visual worlds: BMW mobility on Mars and a global ocean-sustainability initiative.
Branding the studio and branding the vision were inseparable.

CHALLENGE

Define an identity system that:
– stands apart from legacy agency aesthetics
– signals credibility to automotive leadership
– remains flexible enough to house speculative, high-concept BMW futures programs
– operates equally well in decks, rooms, workshops, and high-level presentations
– balances intellect with imagination

The system needed to be articulate enough for the C-suite, and strange enough for the future.

APPROACH

Instead of pulling from tech visual tropes, I built the identity from human mark-making — sketches, scratches, archetypal symbols — visual languages that predate modern branding.

Key components:

• Logo system
A hand-drawn mark inspired by Julian Schnabel’s layered visual grammar — rough, intuitive, confident.

• Icon set
A suite of hand-drawn symbols functioning as a semiotic toolkit.
Each icon sits between map, diagram, and myth — a reflection of the studio’s mandate to operate across imagination and strategy.

• Core keyart
A signature image: a horse suspended between sky and sea, inspired by Sonora Webster’s divines, in B&W.
A gold-burning circle functioning as an ouroboros — symbolizing cycles of reinvention.

DESIGN LOGIC

The IP identity rests on one principle:

Innovation requires a human signature.

Where most innovation studios lean on sterile futurism, IP’s identity asserts that imagination is an ancient human behavior — and that strategy gains power when expressed through marks that feel lived, intuitive, and non-mechanical.

This duality — hand-drawn intelligence inside a future-facing studio — became IP’s design position.

OUTCOME

The system made IP legible, distinct, and trustworthy — a studio defined not by aesthetics, but by visual thinking as strategy.