The Collected Works designed an AI brand without chasing disruption

The Brand Identity: Agora provides developers with APIs for embedding voice, video, chat, interactive streaming and AI capabilities into applications. When the company approached New York City and New Orleans-based design studio The Collected Works, they needed a unified visual language capable of tying together this sprawling product ecosystem.

The challenge was complicated: create connective tissue that could work as hero artwork whilst also functioning as a subtle background element behind UI screens, typography or other design elements. The studio began with an extensive research and development phase: sketching, animating, prototyping and modelling dozens of possible visual directions. Dot grids and dot maps emerged as early frontrunners, feeling immediately appropriate as metaphors for data, flow and a connected world. The team explored asymmetric grids, fluid and dreamlike waves, top-down expansions and radial growth systems.

“In the end, we could not push that direction far enough to feel truly ownable or flexible at a full system level,” Partner & Creative Director Justin Colt explains. “There was still real beauty in that experimentation, and it helped us refine our thinking around colour and movement, but the dot pattern never fully came together.” The concept wasn’t entirely abandoned – elements survived as a subtle shimmer and iridescent quality within the final solution.

The team also tested flowing line work, ripple motifs and atmospheric visualisations that felt smoky or fog-like, though none reached a place where they could carry the system. Where they ultimately landed was what they call the ‘Aura’ – a layer stack of organic discs building on top of one another. The concept abstractly represents Agora’s technical stack and the breadth of their offerings across conversational AI, video, voice and chat. “We also liked that there was enough ambiguity within it for people to bring their own interpretations to it,” Colt shares.

“It feels like a living, breathing presence, almost like the emotional heart of the company.” The flexibility built into the Aura wasn’t a late addition but a byproduct of how the studio naturally works. They reach for procedural tools or code-based approaches whenever possible, enjoying the workflow of building systems and playing with values until something hits the mark. As soon as they understood the problem, they jumped straight into Blender and began constructing visual systems using Geometry Nodes – where small building blocks can be plugged together to create what Colt describes as a “recipe” for achieving a particular result.

For example, creating an undulating amorphous sphere might start with a sphere node fed into an offset node, with random values introduced to offset all points in various directions. The Aura was essentially this process at a much larger scale, with node setups growing considerably complex. The studio hooked parts of this system to sliders and dropdowns that can be tweaked within preset ranges, meaning Agora’s team can output infinite variations without needing to navigate the full technical complexity.

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The article discusses a significant project in the AI branding space, which is relevant to brand strategy professionals, while also presenting a somewhat innovative approach to visual identity design.