How Moniker and Standard Projects designed Sunday Robotics’ brand

The Brand Identity: The four-lobed mark at the centre of Sunday Robotics’ identity sits somewhere between a cell and a bloom. It is round enough to feel alive and geometric enough to read as intentionally designed. It was drawn to function as a physical object before it was ever animated on screen. It’s embossed into silicone, etched into metal, pressed into the surface of a product, then later set in motion across the website.

“We wanted something that felt living and engineered at the same time,” Brent Couchman, Founder & Creative Director at San Francisco-based identity studio Moniker, tells us. Sunday Robotics was founded by Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, whose research into how robots learn from humans reshaped the field before the company existed. Their proprietary Skill Capture Glove allows their fully autonomous home robot, Memo, to learn rapidly from an ever-expanding skill library. After more than a year building in stealth, the team needed to take Memo from the lab into real life.

Moniker partnered with Melbourne-based digital studio Standard Projects on the brand, website and launch campaign, with Pocket Pictures producing the launch film. The strategic foundation arrived in the very first conversation with Sunday’s founders. Moniker named it ‘Playful Precision,’ a phrase that captured a contradiction the founders themselves embodied. “Tony and Cheng had built something genuinely unprecedented in robotics, but they talked about it with this disarming warmth,” Couchman shares. “The technical ambition was enormous, but the product itself is soft, rounded, friendly.

That tension was interesting to us because it felt honest to the company.” From that strategy, Moniker articulated Sunday’s mission as “Life, made lighter,” framing the entire proposition around what robots should ultimately deliver: time returned. Memo gave the visual system its source material. Rounded corners, soft forms and a palette drawn directly from the product’s silicone shell and colourways carry that warmth into typography, layout and motion. The brand mark holds different qualities depending on where it appears, tactile in physical applications and expressive through motion on screen.

Couchman credits the open back-and-forth with Shy Yang, Sunday’s Founding Designer, with shaping where the mark eventually landed. “We went back and forth on the mark for a while. That kind of open, iterative exchange is where the best work tends to come from, and we landed on something none of us would have found without the partnership.” The primary typeface is Basel Grotesk by Chi-Long Trieu, published through Optimo. Rooted in Swiss modernism, it carries a welcoming feel that avoids the expected coldness of that tradition, holds up across display and body copy, and complements the wordmark and logo without overshadowing them.

Styrene B by Berton Hasebe, from Commercial Type, plays a supporting role in more technical contexts: specifications, data labels, the engineered side of the experience. “There’s a deliberate tension between the two: Basel carries the warmth, Styrene carries the precision,” Couchman notes. Standard Projects built the website to serve audiences with very different appetites. Consumers picturing Memo in their kitchen needed a different experience from engineers and investors evaluating the technology underneath, and the site moves between the two through a deliberate palette shift.

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