The Human Story Of Light
When we restarted inPhocal in 2020 we came back to one of the hardest and yet seemingly simple parts of creating the company. How to create the brand in a way that would communicate what the company does, and what our values were. This had been part of the struggle with V1 where they relied on talking about how many people in the team had a Phd, it just wasn’t at all relatable. If anything the message was exclusive, alienating and patronising. Smart experts solve problem for peers in the know at best, or idiots at worst. Enter myself and Niel Vredeveldt, the husband of one of the company cofounders, Kathy.
Niel has a strong background in design and took the logo we already had from V1. It was designed by the incubator's in-house design team as was the previous yellow colour scheme. Niel completely recreated the logo and colour scheme by a process of integration that perfectly described what the company does in one simple image. Below on the page his steps from ideation to the final logo design can be seen.
"We are inPhocal and this is Light Without Limits"
Watch the inPhocal Company Movie 2020 to learn about our vision.
The original (technically the second) company One Pager can also be seen below. I used this and did a number of workshops with the technical team to understand how we could best communicate what makes the company special. It was like pulling teeth at times, getting deeply technical people to explain what this technology MEANS. Not just what it physically does. Eventually, after consulting technical documents, doing workshops and asking every question I could think of, it hit me.
Optical technology had pretty much been stagnant since its inception 400 years ago. We still used the Gaussian magnifying glass like lens setup to do any and everything with light and lasers. Now, with a structured laser beam we could create lasers that would propagate through space, stretching that intense heat spot, the focal depth from one millimetre to 400 millimetres, a 400x difference. We had moved beyond the limit of what had previously been possible to do with light. Hence I came up with the new slogan ‘Light Without Limits’ which replaced the pretty previous, pretty dry slogan ‘Always In Focus’.
In order to get to that one short sentence I had to understand not only the technology, but also the entire history of the human relationship to light as a tool in our evolution. It was that that led to the company movie, The Human Story Of Light. Simplicity is far more difficult than it looks, because it requires a real understanding of both the physics of the thing and how that fits into the past, present and future.
Original storyboard
On Google Slides here: Company Movie Storyboard
THe original slide deck with inPhocal's company movie storyboard.
Slides script
- Slide One - Silence.
- Slide Two - Silence.... A candle comes on and stays for 2-3 seconds - ‘This is the human story of light, the great illuminator.’
- Slide Three - ‘The way that we have measured our years, months and days for millennia. Light is the mother of father time.’.
- Slide Four - ‘Light is how we have measured our hours, our minutes and our seconds, taking ever larger and ever smaller steps in our progress.’
- Slide Five - Seedlings growing - Only background epic music/track - As the last sprout comes up ‘Harnessing light…..’
- Slide Six - Travelling through the greenhouse 'is how we created large scale agriculture and built the first of our great civilisations’.
- Slide Seven - Goes over the cityscape with just the background track
- Slide Eight - ‘We have used light to look further down into the secrets of nature beginning to understand the infinitesimally small things that make up the world around us.’
- Slide Nine - ‘We have also turned our gaze outwards into the endless mysteries of the universe’
- Slide Ten - ‘and may one day discover that we are not alone.’
- Slide Eleven - ‘At inPhocal we continue this tradition, having created the biggest innovation in light optics for 400 years. Paired with a laser, our beam can go further, mark better and cut finer than anything in existence today’.
- Slide Fourteen - ‘We are inPhocal, and this is light without limits’
Get In Touch
Have questions about this project or interested in something similar? Feel free to reach out.