Reaktor

We started by defining a brand platform that maintains the tension between Reaktorians’ ambition and their humility. Instead of dreaming into a distant tech future, we root ourselves gamely in the present. Instead of harping on about digital transformation, we commit ourselves to iterative, one-step-at-a-time progress. Instead of claiming to be the best in the business, we champion innovative ways of working that will help Reaktor and their clients improve. This is Reaktor’s “Culture of Better,” a platform for external marketing and internal company practice.

Reaktorians are consummate professionals, but their magic is their creativity—the imagination, eccentricity, and ingenuity they bring to every project. We wanted to preserve this personality at all costs, so we explored a visual identity in two layers: one that projects cool-headed formality and another that gives prospective clients and hires a peek behind the consultancy curtains. Our shorthand for these two layers is IQ (more buttoned-up, structured) and EQ (more playful, organic).

Reaktor’s existing “R” logo signified duality, but it did so by conveying brokenness— symbolizing a particular twenty-tens’ penchant for disruption, making stuff and breaking stuff. (The “R” literally broke apart on hover, as did navigation items.) Not wanting to throw brand equity out with the bathwater, we adapted the mark, ever so subtly, to be less about breaking things and more about the Reaktorian duality of IQ and EQ. The two halves of the mark are more balanced now, and it is incorporated as a dividing element between the formal structure of IQ and the organic playfulness of EQ.

The notion of a signature duality between IQ and EQ became an organizing principle for site explorations as well. One concept was to bring previously siloed Reaktor.com content (blog posts, articles, podcast episodes, announcements) closer together into an expressive, exploratory content library—and to organize it in such a way that it could be made filterable and searchable.