Biocad

Ilya Ruderman: This project started when I was approached by Kirill Medvedkov, a newly appointed art director at the Biocad biotech company that develops and produces drugs and medical products, including Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine. Kirill joined Biocad to rebrand it — to help the company get a new logo, and update the entire design system. He already had in mind a certain set of images, so he was looking for a quite specific thing, a geometric sans of a specific voice and sound. He saw this future sans typeface as a mix of an image of a tech brand, almost an IT company, and the style of Avant Garde typeface by Herb Lubalin (that we rather associate with disco stylistics of the 1970s, early 1980s). 

Yury Ostromentsky: What’s interesting here is that the customer didn’t come to us with a request to renew their logo, as is often the case, or to design a typeface because their old one had become outdated, or its license had inspired. No, they set themselves a goal of building an entire new style, all internal and external communication, based on new typography. I believe this has to do with the fact that the things they do are so complicated that they often have to speak through words and symbols. Which is why type is an important actor in their communication. 

Graphically, it was not an easy job — to design yet another geometric sans typeface. That is actually one of our most common commissions, ‘Would you design us a new typeface? We want a geometric sans serif font’. We even have at least three of those in our portfolio. Therefore, we had to design a sans serif typeface that not only will differ from all the other geometric sans serifs, but will also appear as the right choice for this specific company. 

Ilya Ruderman: Beside other things, we had to create icons that could reflect what this company does, all this pharmacological research. Kirill even sent us these massive talks and presentations so that we learn to tell DNA from RNA. How a virus cell looks, how viral vectors look, what haemophilia looks like. Pipettes, cell tissue, chromosomes. Yura was in charge of pictograms, and he introduced animation in some of them. There were amoebas with moving eyes! Our customer was happy.