“This brand identity serves as a comprehensive communication piece that effectively captures the company’s essence. The tedious, repetitive task of data analysis was turned into cohesive, dynamic design pieces with bold typography, patterns and imagery. This approach brought the data to life in an engaging and easily digestible format.” —Nadia Méndez
“I love the way the custom code-based display typeface is used to create captivating visuals, and the graphics generator is a great idea for effortlessly creating cohesive graphics. Altogether, it’s a brilliant identity.” —Tony Hird
For Boundary Analytics, a B2B SaaS marketing and data platform, Cotton Design created a data-driven brand identity, custom code-based typeface and graphics generator that help the platform stand apart from the noise and define it as more than just another software company.
Comments by Talia Cotton, creative director, Cotton Design:
Tell us about yourself and your practice at the crossroads of design and technology. What are your specialties, and what clients do you typically work with? We specialize in using code as a limitless design medium with a strict level of control. We are hyper aware that many people perceive “creative coding” today as confusing or abstract. In our work, we anchor it with full control and harness it as a limitless tool for traditional communication design. With code, design can be interactive, generative, automated, data-driven, adaptable, computational and more—but we’re particularly interested in what these qualities signify. In our practice, we’ve found that this approach enables design to represent diverse perspectives—often without bias—be genuinely community-driven and evolve over time, among other things.
We don’t have a specific type of client; we’ve worked with large corporations and small startups in fashion, culture, tech, non-profits and beyond. However, we’ve recently found that many clients seek us out because they want to stand out. With coding as a limitless creative tool, we’re finding that the outputs we produce are unique.
What was your process in developing the identity for Boundary Analytics? Our process began by examining the types of data outputs produced by Boundary Analytics. Central to its work is the concept of time lag—the company tracks multiple datasets over time to uncover patterns that might otherwise seem confusing or dense. We wanted to visualize how these numbers are interconnected, showing that data points don’t fluctuate randomly but have relationships from one month to the next. We developed a simple pattern: a series of columns where the width of each column corresponds to a specific data point. This visual concept thus became the foundation for the entire identity, from the logo to patterns, images and even the typeface.
How did you develop the code-based typeface you created for Boundary Analytics? By the time we got to the typeface, we had already created an image generator that enabled the client to upload any image, select levels of abstraction and output it in their unique patterned brand style. One day, I had the idea of creating a custom typeface for the brand as well. I suggested to Chris, one of our designers, that we take the client’s primary typeface, apply a motion blur to introduce tonal variations and feed it to the image generator. The result was almost exactly what we envisioned—it was incredible. We spent a lot of time fine-tuning the parameters, but the core concept was solid from the start. We then exported the generated typography and spent several weeks retracing it to create a pixel-perfect vector version. But the visual work—the
hard part—was essentially done by the code.
What inspired the graphics generator you created? Our graphics generator was inspired by the data-derived patterns we developed. We discovered that increasing the level of abstraction made the outputs more versatile as patterns. In terms of its use, the client needed something adaptable that could be applied to various assets, from blog posts to corresponding imagery, among other things.
Did any surprising challenges emerge during the creation of this identity system? Not particularly. The good thing about what we do is our process is highly controlled and meticulously planned. Code has the potential to look super experimental and confusing to most audiences, so we’re very careful to make sure it always has reason and looks good. The result is that we rarely encounter any surprising challenges. The process tends to go smoothly.
What emerging technologies do you think will have a huge impact on type design, and why? I think if anything, we will continue to see a rise in interactivity and typography that does something instead of just existing statically. When the user is involved in the behavior and appearance of the typeface, there’s an opportunity for a relatable narrative that you don’t get simply from static typefaces.
Conversely, we’re also seeing a trend (that I personally loathe) where creative coders apply filters or effects to existing typefaces, often resulting in a brutal aesthetic that undermines the original design. I think in our circumstance, we had transformed the base typeface so dramatically that it effectively became a new creation, but we’re cautious not to rely on coding gimmicks alone—that’s partially why we were careful to control the right parameters and trace over the letterforms manually once the visual concept had been produced.
In our creative practice, as mentioned, leveraging computation and code grants us complete creative control beyond the limitations of standard tools like Glyphs or Figma. This freedom allows us to do anything, but our focus always returns to creating meaningful design.
