Under After brands Reasoning Project with a human face in the AI era

The Brand Identity: Reasoning Project backs the people it believes will define the next era, starting from a clear thesis: as AI makes building cheap, reasoning becomes the scarce resource – the judgment to be early, to be right, and to hold conviction when no one else will. The firm grew out of Operators & Friends, which had supported the first public launch of Lovable and the unveiling of Legora.

As the network passed 10,000 people two years in, Co-founders Michelangelo Pagliara and Juhana Peltomaa turned to New York-based creative studio Under After for an identity to match their ambition. “We believe things that are well defined usually create well-defined ceilings,” Pagliara explains. “Operators & Friends described exactly what we were, but that precision became a limit. It told people what to expect before they arrived.” The replacement carries the thesis in its title. “We arrived at it by watching what stopped being scarce,” he continues.

‘Project’ was a deliberate choice over ‘venture’ – “it highlights our mission to help builders succeed, rather than defining ourselves as a venture the way many firms do” – and the manifesto rests on two lines the founders want remembered: ‘reasoning is the new scarcity’ and ‘those who can move talent will move the world.’ That belief, that judgment lives in people, set Under After a brief with an unusual demand for something representing capital and investors: make it feel human and in motion rather than institutional.

“Finding that unexpected intersection, where two unconnected ideas meet, was the opportunity for a brand with a unique point of view,” Creative Director Mark Forscher tells us. The tension was practical as much as tonal, since the brand needed to sit credibly beside the biggest names in tech while keeping a lane of its own.

“How would the Reasoning Project brand feel both at home with some of the biggest brands in tech in a row of logos,” Forscher asks, “but also find its own lane as a connector of people and ideas?” With the founders set on positioning against traditional venture firms, the studio steered clear of the category’s louder reaches – bold typography, stock imagery and self-congratulatory founder bios. With the serif wordmark, the grid and the typographic system carrying the credibility, the human qualities had somewhere to concentrate: a gestural, almost hand-drawn ‘R.’ The early explorations went the other way.

“I explored and shared some clean geometric marks, but they felt more like a tech start-up than a symbol fitting Michelangelo and Juhana’s vision,” Forscher reveals. The turn came from a reference the duo had shared, which carried a small hand-drawn illustration. “That detail stuck with me. What if that imperfection became the primary mark instead of a hidden detail?” So he drew the ‘R’ with a Sharpie, fast and loose, pushing the gesture as far as it would go, watching for the version with the most energy.

Article truncated for readability. Read the full piece →

This article discusses a significant shift towards human-centric branding in the context of AI, which is highly relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals, while also introducing some novel design elements.