Under After’s Nurture identity blends hand-drawn and generative design — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Nurture builds the infrastructure for epigenomics – the science of the chemical tags and structural changes across a genome that control gene expression without altering the DNA beneath them. Its tools read the epigenome, software interprets it, and systems remodel it. The customers are biology companies, and within them, the scientists who handle epigenomic data. Tellus is the company’s platform. For the brand strategy and identity, Nurture’s founders turned to New York-based creative studio Under After.

“All of our brand work started with a story of what we wanted to build, how we saw the world and the narratives we used to translate the deep technical concepts to a general audience. We didn’t have any pre-existing brand content to build on,” Co-founder & CEO Chuck Frazier tells us. The company works across all of biology, from plants and fungi to human health. “Our brand captures the magic of why the epigenome is a powerful layer of biology: it is the layer where all organisms adapt and encode memory,” Co-founder & CTO Savannah Dearden explains.

It’s fair to say that epigenomics is a niche area of molecular biology. Recognition of it is growing fast, but most people have not heard of it. The brand needed to introduce it, and at the same time, position Nurture at the forefront of that recognition. “The question you want is ‘what is Nurture?’” Under After’s Creative Director, Mark Forscher, tells us.

The founders asked for an identity grounded in the experiences of everyday life, one that makes epigenomics feel accessible. “Magical, hopeful, human. Deep science delivered with warmth, not weight,” Forscher explains of the brief. He has spent years on deeply technical start-ups. “I want every brand I design to be one people want to live in,” he adds. Epigenomics was not his field. “Fascinating and hard to fully grasp if you are not fluent in the science, which I am not,” he notes. Because epigenomic research applies to every organism, he wanted the visual language to match that breadth, consistent and expansive at once.

“As an emerging field, epigenomics has less established visual metaphors, so I looked for inspiration in the humanity of science,” Forscher continues. During the brand strategy phase, he presented mood boards on a few themes, one of them the field notes and understated beauty of science. “The hand-drawn illustrations and scribbles of the field notes plus the large colour blocks from magazine layouts connected the most with the founders.”

Nurture and Tellus share one visual system, and it starts with a palette of eight colours, which the identity uses in bold blocks. Under After set both brands in independent type foundry 26A1’s Marund 5002 Corner – a neo-grotesque drawn across three axes, so its styles differ in how each character’s corners are cut, outside and in – paired with Geist Mono. “The letterforms and unique rounding system balance familiarity with unpredictability. The outer cuts didn’t feel serious enough for a deeply technical product, but the inner rounded corners of Marund 5002 add a subtle softness,” Forscher explains.

Of the two, Nurture is the company brand, the one that introduces its founders, their thesis and the context of an emerging science. Its wordmark is capitalised like a name. Tellus is the platform that scientists work in, reading epigenomic data and turning it into an answer. “Its wordmark primarily lives in the product UI and needs to communicate speed and actionable insight, so I set it in all caps with more generous letterspacing that felt a bit more like machined precision. But the practical reality is both brands are new, and if I gave them equal weight in the visual system they’d both be less memorable. So we chose to emphasise Nurture and have Tellus feel like a solid secondary mark,” he notes.

For the imagery, Under After built a custom generative app. “Honestly, it was a messy mix of trying to understand the science well enough to translate it into something visual and experimenting in code,” Forscher tells us. The studio ran weekly brand sessions with Frazier and Dearden, working on the strategy and story together. After one of those sessions, Forscher sat at his desk with the call notes open and images of cells, a leaf and a monarch butterfly on screen. He had already tried browser-based tools that applied different treatments across a set of images. None of them was grounded in a real concept. “Savannah had talked about being inspired by the emergent variation in nature itself. If every organism is built from the same underlying structure, and if epigenetic mechanisms are still somewhat unpredictable but apply across all of life in different ways, then what does a visual system with a simple rule set and a layer of unexpected variation look like?” he details. Given a photograph of any organism, the app splits it into a grid of blocks and averages the underlying colour value of a random number of them, laying the result back over the picture. Forscher added controls for randomness, grid size and colour averaging, and tuned them until it held up across many images.

Nurture’s site, which Under After designed and built, lets a visitor trigger that averaging with the mouse. “At the time of the brand launch, Tellus was still in private beta. So the Nurture site couldn’t demo the product. The brand imagery is evocative and I thought that adding some interactivity would bring a visitor closer to touching the system,” Forscher explains. “Surprisingly, the concept took longer to develop than the execution,” he adds of the generative system.

Against all that procedural work, Under After drew a set of spot illustrations by hand and left them rough, using them fairly selectively on the site. Forscher’s case for drawing them is an argument about AI. “I believe that the more we fully rely on AI in the process of creating brands, the more we elevate sameness. LLMs are only as good as the context of their prompts and their training data, and the ideas they return to us have already originated elsewhere. The ease of execution disguises a slide into sameness that I think we all recognise to some degree the more we work with these tools. So for a brand to feel authentic in this era, I think it requires some incongruity and imperfection to reflect our humanity,” he tells us. Frazier and Dearden wanted that imperfection too. “The loose illustrations for Nurture are meant to work this way, as spot editorial illustrations that contrast with the generative imagery system and the bold colour blocks. Complex ideas expressed loosely,” he adds.

For the launch, Under After made posters that use the line ‘Accelerated Adaptation.’ “Now, the brand helps us cleanly convey the power of what our technology can unlock across many applications while speaking to exactly what our product offering is,” Dearden notes. “Before launch, most of our engagements were from direct outreach from us through our networks, rather than inbound. Now, researchers are signing up directly and bringing their data into the platform,” Frazier concludes.