Digital Architecture Lab is a research and development technology lab based in Japan. Core to their philosophy is decentralization, community, and inclusiveness within digital infrastructures.

The Lab team wanted to explore how their values might manifest in a new visual language. It was critical that the identity is open source and could be remixed by anyone from the Lab community.

Central to the identity are the “soft pixels” as dubbed by the Lab. We decided to model the subtle concave curvatures of the soft pixels after Optima Nova by Linotype. This pixel served as the primary building block of the identity.

The resulting design system shows the flexibility and mutability of the soft pixel motif. The pixels can be rearranged endlessly to create illustrations, patterns, symbols, even typography.