How Ashfall built out Shelby’s identity from an extruded hexagon

The Brand Identity: The first version of Shelby’s symbol was a cube inside a cube. A direct, almost literal expression of storage holding storage. Then, trademark clearance flagged an existing mark sitting too close, and Ashfall Studio had to rethink the foundational form of an identity it was building for the decentralised hot storage protocol preparing to launch into a market dominated by AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. The outer cube became a hexagon. The inner cube became a sphere. “In the end, that change helped the system,” explains Martin Ehrlich, Founder & Design Director.

“The hexagon kept the structural side of the idea while the circle brought in something softer and more fluid.” Static, the mark is stable and self-contained. In motion, it opens up, taking on depth and energy. That tension became the organising principle for everything that followed. Shelby is hot storage, which means data that needs to be available right now, not retrieved from a vault somewhere. It is also Web3-native and pitched at developers building AI-adjacent applications, where egress costs from traditional clouds break the maths the moment usage scales.

Ashfall shaped strategy, identity and motion system together, with the product itself still forming around the work. “This was not a project where strategy could happen in complete isolation and then be handed over to design,” Ehrlich notes. “The strategic work and the visual system had to inform each other.” The hexagon proliferates across the wider system: repeated and overlaid, sliced at 60° angles, set into rounded containers, arranged into compositions that suggest data moving through space.

Layouts split roughly fifty-fifty between content sat inside rounded-corner cards and content sat outside them, creating a rhythm of structure and openness that runs through every composition. The cards themselves carry 60° angle cutouts that align with the patterns and mark, so the geometry never feels grafted on. On the website, static assets let structure sit quietly, but once things start scrolling and shifting, the brand can drift toward looseness or overcorrect into stiffness. The colours shift on scroll. Patterns move directionally. “The motion is quite deliberate. Things happen in sequence.

One thing moves, then the next,” Ehrlich explains. “It gives the brand energy, but it also keeps the feeling that something precise is holding it together.” Three set principles govern the motion system: dynamic, straightforward and spatial. Dynamic carries the speed and responsiveness Shelby needs to communicate as a hot storage product. Straightforward forces the restraint that keeps a small kit of elements from descending into chaos.

Spatial extends the geometry into time, with flat forms moving through implied depth rather than reaching for full 3D. The same thinking shapes Shelby’s typography, where letterforms animate in ways that build pace and emphasis. GT Planar by Grilli Type is used as the main voice. It’s bold and self-confident with a slight chunkiness that keeps it from reading as too corporate. “There was an interesting formal reason we liked it,” Ehrlich shares. “Some of its angled details sit very naturally alongside the geometric logic we were already building into the system.

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The article discusses a significant rebranding effort for Shelby, showcasing innovative design strategies that are relevant and applicable to brand strategy professionals.