Pedro Viana, founder of UNFLD
Hive Mind
The space between two ideas
Every time I look at our symbol, I think of someone.
Our former CTO was my mentor and a close partner in the work. Sometimes we would each think through what to do next on our own. When we finally talked, we would discover we had already reached the same conclusion.
He had a name for it. He called it hive mind.
What I love about that memory is that until we talked, I only knew my half of the story. He had worked his way there on his own. Hearing how he got there was just as interesting as finding out we had landed in the same place.
When I began thinking about a new identity for UNFLD, I wanted that relationship to be part of the drawing. If the symbol ever appeared by itself on a phone screen, without those five letters beside it, I wanted to be able to point to it and tell someone where it came from.
What fits between two folds
What interested me about a honeycomb was the way one cell meets the next. Two cells can share a wall. It reminded me of our partnership and how the way each of us worked helped shape the other’s work.
There was another clue in the company name. Unfolding the Future already carries the motion of unfolding. A fold in a sheet of paper could bring those ideas together in a shape small enough to hold in your hand.
The letter in the gap
Look at the two bands first. The inner one turns before the outer one. Both come out of the turn heading the same way. Now follow the empty strip between them. That is where the U in UNFLD appears.
We call the symbol Célula aberta, the open cell. I like being able to see each fold separately and still recognize the shape they make together. That is where I see my mentor in the drawing.
The old identity had something worth carrying forward. The hexagon was already there. In the new logo, that outline opens up and honey enters the dark field that was already ours. If you know UNFLD, you can see the family resemblance.
From here on
I think of that story whenever people have to build a system together. The person designing a screen needs to understand what happens to the person using it. The person writing a rule needs to know why the rule exists. When that understanding travels, each person can make decisions that help the other, even from far away.
That is the kind of company I want to build. And if someone asks me one day what those two folds in the corner of their screen mean, I’ll start by telling them about a person.
Pedro Viana
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