Studio Gruhl’s identity for Rerun is hard and human at the same time

The Brand Identity: Rerun builds open source software that lets robotics teams see what their robots see, then log, query and train on the data behind it. The Stockholm-based company had outgrown the gradient and domain-name-focused logo it started with, so Berlin-based Studio Gruhl took on the rebrand and digital design system to reset where Rerun sits in its category. The old mark had a deeper problem than just its dated execution. “It read like just another dark-themed tech thing,” Katerina Gavrilo, Design Lead at Rerun, tells us.

Rerun had started as a visualiser and grown into something larger, a database that happens to be easily visualisable, and the brand had stopped keeping up. Robotics has a fixed picture in most people’s heads: sterile rooms, white surfaces or a robot arm under perfect light. Studio Gruhl mapped that image against what the Rerun team actually does on a day-to-day basis, and the reality came back much grittier. Think bolts, soldering irons and melted chips, closer to a workshop than a lab. The studio leaned into the human story behind the product rather than the clinical one in front of it.

“Developers building robots are creating from the same place as any other maker,” Gavrilo explains. The direction was clear once the team saw the alternatives side by side. One route leaned fully into the precision aesthetics of robotics, but the moment it appeared, the team knew it wasn’t for them, which cleared the way for a brand built on play and experimentation. That concept is clearest in the wordmark, which takes its geometry from the head of a bolt.

“When we, as outsiders, think about robots, we think about futuristic clean white spaces, while real robotics is visually closer to a tinker lab,” Malte Gruhl, Founder & Creative Director at Studio Gruhl, tells us.

“It's a very hands-on experience where you solder, weld and literally use bolts and screws, so using this as a metaphor for the wordmark felt like a very interesting starting point.” The ‘e’ earned its place at the centre point of the design for a practical reason: the ‘r,’ ‘u’ and ‘n’ share much of the same construction, so the ‘e’ is the only outlier, making it the natural starting point to build the rest of the letters around. Within those forms, Studio Gruhl reduced the kerning and melted the letters slightly together, giving the wordmark a tactile, handmade quality against the precision of the rest of the system.

“The melting, even though it feels handmade, was done very precisely and took a long time to visually balance,” Gruhl explains. “It’s meant to evoke that flow state of making, the moment when craft and precision stop being opposites.” The duality is the studio’s organising instinct. Connecting things that haven’t been connected before is how it works, and the tension that results is what it wants the brand to represent. It’s hard and analytical when it needs to be, soft and human everywhere else. Colour is where that split is literal.

Article truncated for readability. Read the full piece →

The rebranding of Rerun by Studio Gruhl is significant as it showcases a strategic shift in brand identity that resonates with current trends in user engagement, making it relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals.