The brand

The product was entirely digital, so we wanted the brand to feel like something you could put your hands on. We were drawn to something a little retro for warmth but didn’t want to lean entirely into nostalgia. Digging through digital archives like the Smithsonian’s, we found a lot of really cool annotated technical diagrams which inspired us in how they were technical first and stylish almost by accident.

At one point, I went down a total plotter art rabbit hole. Plotter art is one of the earliest instances of code meeting art: a machine moves a pen according to instructions a person wrote. Tactile, on real paper. A little rudimentary, inherently geometric, but also somehow undeniably human.

Most of those references never made it into the final brand, but they did click some things into focus. Over a few decades, the computer went from something you’d only find in a lab to something you’d find in a home.

Blockchain’s currently in the middle of its own transition from niche technology to something the largest financial institutions are adopting, and Lotus was dreamed up in the midst of it. We thought a bit of that should come through in the brand itself.

The icon

We started with the icon. We wanted something that leaned masculine but still suggested flower. It needed to be simple, but not empty. What exactly it should symbolize, we weren’t sure yet. But we kept circling similar ideas: clarity; structure; solidity.

Lotus flowers are unique in that they have a multi-layered, overlapping petal structure. This lets them protect their inner core, but also makes them weirdly difficult to put into a logo. If you try to rotate a shape into a radial pattern, it’s really easy to slip into a mandala / religious symbol sort-of-thing.

Lotus the protocol is unique in that its markets are broken into discrete tranches, but capital still flows across them as if they were a single unified market. Each tranche is its own distinct thing, but also plays a role in forming the structure of the overall market. That leads to all sorts of cool outcomes for lenders and borrowers, but hey now! it also sure feels similar to how a Lotus flower grows. That’s where we got the idea: what if the icon was a market and the petals were its tranches?

The wordmark

We fell in love with Neue Machina early on in the type explorations. It was actually one of the first five fonts we trialed. It felt like such a cool distillation of the way we’d been thinking about the brand. It’s definitively engineered, but also has this quirky, almost human, character to it. It felt serious enough for Lotus to position as institutional but was also full of cyberpunk attitude. Unfortunately, we found it too soon. It can’t be that easy! So it wasn’t before exploring hundreds more fonts before we accepted that—yes—we’d gotten it right off the bat.

For the wordmark, we tightened the spacing and cut the terminals of the S on a diagonal. We also reshaped the O’s counter to match the angles of the icon.

We chose Neue Montreal, a Helvetica-esque workhorse from the same foundry, for subheaders and body. This pairing let us be loud in the headers and invisible where the information really needed to come through.

The colors

For a long time Lotus had a color scheme that was basically dark blacks and grays + purple. I think we went with purple because David, the CEO, really liked the Egyptian Lotus and it felt like a nod to the flower without being overtly feminine.

As we got further into product design, Alica went crazy deep on semantic risk colors. She went through maybe thirty variations of slightly different risk gradients. She started looking like that meme of Charlie from Always Sunny while explaining the reasoning behind the new jumps between colors. “I know this yellow is crazy here but hear me out!”

As those colors evolved, we found they kept becoming more integral across the brand, which actually created this weird in-between phase where we had our ‘real’ brand color, purple, that we increasingly couldn’t quite figure out where to fit in.

At some point we sort of realized: wait a second, we have this beautiful, deeply considered gradient of colors that’s embedded across the core functionality of the product. Lotus arranges its markets over a linear spectrum – a literal gradient from low risk to high risk. I think the risk colors are the brand colors. We officially retired purple as a brand color, but it still lives on in the undertones of our grayscale.

That’s how we ended up with the palette that permeates the brand.

The rings

Lotus structures its markets in a fundamentally different way. This meant from the beginning we knew we’d need to find ways to help the audience establish a mental model for how it works.

I wanted to create a dynamic design that tapped into the substrate of the protocol’s data. How cool would it be if we created a living, evolving visual for what was happening at the smart-contract level?

To that end, the data points we could leverage were things like: $ supplied, $ borrowed, utilization, risk ratings, interest rates per risk level, $ cascading from other risk levels, volatility, etc.

My first stab at it was this sort of plotter ecosystem map. Markets were clusters of lines, vaults were hexagons and particles would zap across the connections at an ever more frenetic pace as protocol activity ramped up. You could regenerate the visual daily and always get a new composition following the same logic.

I think the problem with this approach was ultimately that it wasn’t doing enough clarifying work. My goal at that point had been a framework for a cool, generative visual, that we could revisit over time to show the protocol grow. And that’s what we got. But it didn’t really connect many dots for the viewer, and it certainly didn’t help them build a mental model around how Lotus worked.

Luckily, from the beginning of the generative art sprint, the core thing Alica wanted to explore was this idea of ‘making data beautiful’. She wanted something striking that would also be functional enough for an analyst to use. Following that led us to the rings.

The visualizer is built from stacked concentric circles that connect together to form a market. It’s one unified thing, but segmented into discrete risk levels. In parallel, we’d been developing a simple abacus visual to show allocations in the app. Both mapped to the same tranches, so we realized we could animate one into the other.

The safest, most protected tranches are the inner circles, and the riskiest ones sit exposed at the outer edges. Each ring is made up of tiny little units of capital which communicate details through color.

It’s an echo of the same idea for the icon. One market, many parts.

Ring Lab

By this point, most of our direction was coming together. But every asset was still being assembled by hand. One night, I was working on a design with so many overlapping masking layers that I was starting to feel like throwing my trackpad out of the window. Around that moment, I had the thought that this could probably be automated. Probably with an even better end result.

So we used Claude Code to build Ring Lab, a tool to Lotus anything.

We honestly went a little overboard with it. Ring Lab has no business being as feature packed as it is, but I can tell you one thing: no future designer at Lotus should ever be hurting for inspiration. Paper and ink effects, lens, and offset filters. Ring and background customization, annotations and animation. It’s a joy to go click til you’re surprised.

My favorite setting reads the image beneath the ring overlay and displays each tier’s risk color based on the brightness. The rings then respond to the photo in precisely the way I was struggling to achieve in Figma. And now someone else can get there without having to figure out how!