Robo Inu Finance Part 3
Welcome back to part 3 of our deep-dive into all things Robo Inu Finance. Today it’s all about the design and style. But to lead us down this rabbit-hole we need to first ask:
What do Robotic Dogs on a mission to Mars and decentralized finance have in common?
If you answered ‘not a lot’ you would be correct on the surface level, but not when it comes to inspiration. That’s what happened when our project lead and CEO Vy Pham saw on the news a couple years back. Turns out NASA is building good boi space doggos, which will be sent to the red planet to explore previously inaccessible caves and otherwise difficult terrain to search for overlooked signs of life and even possible locations for future human colonies. Probably we can all agree that that is an extremely cool concept that sounds like it fell out of the pages of a Philip K. Dick novel. How they work is extremely tech-heavy, and is frankly genius in action. Now if you’re unsure exactly what they are, remember that viral YouTube video where the four-legged robot slips on banana peels in the hallway?
They’re like these guys with better balance.
As someone who had to pull herself up by her own bootstraps — venturing into the wild unknowns of Singapore at the young age of 15 from Vietnam and building her business empire off the back of Bitcoin and other cryptos, reading the news about the space dogs was like an ‘Aha’ moment for Vy. “I saw the amazing things that human collaboration can do when it’s focused on a pioneering goal rather than corporate greed. I just sat there for a moment and thought: ‘If more regular people had access to financial freedom and could build their own companies that let them follow their passions and curiosity, what else could we achieve?’ The fastest way I could think that anyone can do that in economic systems that are designed to keep them overworked and underpaid was with DeFi. So I got to work.”
Inspiring stuff indeed.
Now that we have the answer to how robo dogs (and by extension space exploration) and DeFi are linked — the associations are everywhere. Its Robo dog mascot its evident enough of the link, bringing a fun meme-quality to our project — in the sense of an iconic branding totem that a group of connected individuals can rally behind and have with one another, rather than ‘hey thanks for your money investors, we’re gonna split now.’
However, going even further is its iconic two-pillar logo that is evident on all our branding (including t-shirts, hoodies and currently sold out (sorry) coffee mugs on our brand new merchandise shop). Known as the Pillars of Ascent the image is thematically designed to reflect the ‘twilight phenomenon,’ — an utterly gorgeous display which often appears as a result of an exhaust trail left behind when a rocket ship has successfully taken off on its route to outer space. Of course its a branding image that many crypto enthusiasts can recognise in their own space due to an industry language that is infused with terminology like ‘we’re going to the moon’ and ‘pack your bags, this ship is taking off,’ for charts that show significant rise — something that we here at Robo Inu are proud to have seen in our own. Once again a cheeky and knowing connection has been carefully selected to further create a connection between the two aspects.
Vy herself explained during an AMA we had with BinanceLive how the two pillars go even further than simple branding, representing the two core values of the project itself. Of course anyone with any degree of architectural comprehension can easily spot that pillars by their very function are designed to hold things up — they are supportive structures by design. Indeed, that’s exactly what we had in mind when we created the logo, seeing two fundamental pillars as the framework that keeps the entire project strong from the ground up. Freedom on the left and community on the right.
“The freedom pillar represents the financial freedom that anyone can enjoy in ROBO INU FINANCE’s open ecosystem,” Vy explained during the interview. “The community pillar demonstrates the importance of the community when making any big decision.” Our CEO went even further to talk about how it was imperative that their branding reflect their “focus on building a transparent, ambitious and trustworthy community.”
The lift-off and tapering of the design shows how the project has lofty ambitions and is committed to using monumental energy and teamwork to push itself to higher levels constantly until it reaches its goal — just like a rocket during takeoff. In terms of coloring, we chose blue, because it has traditionally reflected trust and authenticity, something that should (but often doesn’t) represent a cornerstone of finance. Finally, the symmetry and order of the logo were designed to reflect order and resilience. (Also it has never been mentioned by Vy or anyone else, but we’re going to drop the bombshell here — anyone looking at the style of the pillars can easily see that it looks just like a highly bullish crypto chart when zoomed out. That wasn’t by accident. ;-)
Our design team is very good at their jobs.
Vy also doesn’t hide the fact that she wants the strong branding identity of the logo and its associated coloring and thematic elements to drive recognition of our brand itself. And we’re sure you’ll agree that this makes perfect sense — after all so many logos are poorly created, and leave the mind almost as soon as they enter. But exceptional ones stay in the head and are easy to recall, and not simply because the brands are popular (although it of course helps). Think of the fruit with the bite out of it, the swoosh, the golden arches, the blue badge with the white font. Chances are you could recall all of these perfectly, and that’s what we here at Robo Global Investment want to happen with our logo. To have it become a household image that people are so familiar with, they instantly go ‘ah yeah the ascent pillars, that’s RBIF’s. The logo tells the story of our brand, and helps it to stand out against the competition. We do like a good laugh and joke on our Medium here, but we are very serious about that vision.
Anyway, the logo is the main aspect when it comes to our brand identity — inspired by NASA’s vision of once-again getting curious about our place in the universe. (You can almost imagine them peering up into the stars like a caped astronaut hero from a 50’s comic-book strip, with his faithful robot dog, Fido, at his side). However, there are other aspect too, like the fonts (always Gotham heading and Neue Haas Unica Pro subheading, and don’t you forget it buddy) to ensure style consistency, and our abstract and angular spaceship and trail that give the rest of the branding a cool visual undertone when things need to be a bit more comprehensive than just the logo. But even further, the brand’s overall design and color bleeds into every aspect of our ecosystem to ensure a coherent visual narrative that ensure it’s immediately recognisable to all:
See what we did there?
In short, the origins and subsequent branding identity of Robo Inu Finance c/o Robo Global Investment is a story — one that began with a successful entrepreneur getting further inspired by something that seemingly has no initial connection to the end product. But the most successful ideas often start as small seeds in the mind and grow until they become vast and all encompassing visions. The idea of financial freedom and community effectively encompasses the entire heart of what decentralized finance was all about, before the bad actors and thieves came along to try and make it theirs. The blue colors aren’t the only refreshing thing about our brand, but also our genuine focus on giving regular people the tools so that they can push themselves ever-closer to financial freedom, in order to eventually allow them to do whatever it is that drives them.
Like putting some robot dogs on mars.
See you at the next blog. Don’t forget to follow us for more stories at linktree
