gnista – nicolezimmermann

Red Dot Award 2022

gnista won the Red Dot Design Award 2022!

The gnista.io (now nista.io) branding won a Red Dot in the category Brands & Communication Design 2022. This is my second Red Dot Design Award, but the first for a brand design. Creating a new world for a company is one of the best jobs one can get as a designer, in my opinion. Being awarded with this highly prestigious award for my, and Ulrich Fuchs work for nista is just amazing.

Red Dot Award: Brands & Communication Design 2022

In 2022, agencies, designers and companies from all over the globe entered communication design projects and brands in the Red Dot Award: Brands & Communication Design. The 24 international members of the Red Dot Jury assessed each project and each brand entered professionally and individually. At the end of the judging process, the entries that won over the jurors with their design quality were selected for a distinction.

Background

ioT Data analitics is slow and complex! 80% of time is lost in getting data ready. That’s where gnista.io comes in. Calculating with sensor data as easily as with pen on paper was the ambition for creating gnista.io

With gnista.io you can organize and calculate with sensor data. The idea is to discover energy saving potentials by easy testing out ideas. The organization and visualization of sensor data, is equally important.

This case study focuses on the branding of gnista. If you are more interested in the story of the software design, you can find the UX/UI use case here (soon!)

Challenge and Approach

Gnista was founded with the one main goal of saving energy. Since a lot of energy is used in production and industry, it was a logical decision to focus on B2B.

Why focus on brand design, even for a B2B product? Brands tell stories and evoke feelings interacting with them.

Ulrich and I made the conscious choice to not tell the visual story of the "green start up". We wanted nista to stand out and tell their own story.
Empowering the team and their users. Working with our software, they should think of themselves as powerful wizards that finally found the right tool to be creative and organized at the same time.

wiktionary.org/wiki/gnista

Insights and Solution

The idea for the brand design leans on mankind’s curiosity of observing the starry sky. Gazing into the infinite. Twinkling stars symbolize our longing for exploring new things and measuring the unknown.

The Brand Design combines all that is important to the team. It represents the spark, the shooting star, the crackling that starts a fire. It represents ultimate curiosity: the symbiosis of ratio and creativity.

Insights and Solution

A dynamic brand design. We didn’t design it just for the sake of it, but because it was the logical thing to do.

The logo contains four of the basic mathematical operators: addition, multiplication, division and subtraction. They are the very foundation of calculations, the core feature of gnista. Aligned, they form the so-called “spark”. – As all four operators are equal in their importance, gnista needed a variable logo system. It consists of four logo variations. In each one, another operator defines the beginning of the spark.

You know what saves energy as well?
Right. Dark themes!

The branddesign had to work first and foremost as a UI design. This is why we tested our ideas on the clickdummies screendesign.

Merch & Stationery

Part of every brand design is to think of future touchpoints with the brand. Gnista is a new, innovation-oriented, but also a comfortable and flexible tool. So the choice of T-shirts over business shirts is a natural one. As for the business cards, the focus lies on quality. Qualitative materials that stand out.