How Recent™ turned a circle, square and triangle into Olla’s identity

The Brand Identity: Circle, square, triangle. Recent™ used those familiar primitive forms as the backbone of the identity for Olla – a liquid staking protocol built for the Aztec network, a privacy-focused blockchain. In plain terms, Olla lets anyone stake Aztec cryptocurrency, earn rewards and stay liquid, without having to understand the complicated infrastructure underneath.

The Abu Dhabi and Amsterdam-based studio’s task was to build an identity that could convey that message to a first-time user. “We asked ourselves: what if we just didn’t do that?” remarks Valentino Angela, Design Director at Recent™, of the custom marks, gradient symbols and abstract iconography that usually aim to signal ‘expertise’ in the DeFi world. “Circles, squares and triangles are the only shapes that are genuinely universal. You know them before you can read. There’s no barrier of interpretation.” The team’s working thesis was that ‘less technical’ is still a reduction.

Start from the same reference point and subtract, and you end up inside the category’s gravitational pull. Olla needed to begin somewhere else. The circle represents liquidity, its continuous form carrying an inherent sense of flow. The square is stable, representing the security layer underneath. The triangle, with its directionality and open peak, signals accessibility. It’s an entry point, a way in. “The moment it really clicked was when the shapes stopped feeling like metaphors and started behaving like a system,” Angela explains.

“When we could see how each one would move, scale and interact with the others across the identity, that’s when we knew it was working.” Season Sans and Mix carry the typography, with the former setting the tone for a brand asking users to trust it with their assets. Mix steps in at smaller scales and in UI states, where the information needs to breathe. “A lot of warm typefaces go too far and lose their credibility,” Angela notes.

“Season Sans has open forms that feel approachable, but the construction is clean and precise enough that it holds up when the brand needs to communicate trust.” Haischel Dabian, Founder of Olla, came into the project with a clear instinct about the palette. His references leaned into energy and youth, pointing the brand toward something that felt alive rather than traditionally institutional. The resulting colour scheme is built on a warm off-white base, with pink added for accessibility, cyan for liquidity and orange for security. Each colour was selected to carry weight in the identity. The pink feels warm and disarming.

Cyan has circulation built into it, an obvious fit for liquidity. While orange holds enough density to make security feel trustworthy. The cumulative effect points away from the dark backgrounds and neon accents that tell newer users a product was built for insiders. The verbal identity landed on ‘staking made easy,’ stitched beneath the wordmark on totes and set at full-bleed scale across campaign imagery. Angela is precise about why that phrasing won out over nearby alternatives.

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The article discusses a unique branding strategy for a DeFi product, which is significant for the industry, especially in simplifying complex concepts, making it relevant for brand strategy professionals.