Branding agency The Partners has created the identity for Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (METI), a new organisation that is trying to contact alien life.

The METI brand needed to explain what the organisation does, raise awareness of its work and encourage potential audiences to take an interest.

“The sector was crowded and filled with repetitive trends. But METI took the investigation into extra-terrestrial life into a new space. We found ourselves returning to one sentence in the brief that seemed, to us, to encapsulate METI’s mission: ‘In one word, messaging’,” explains the agency.

As a result, the designers say they were inspired by code systems, messaging and the origins of language when developing the visual identity.

A particular reference point was the famous Arecibo message, an interstellar radio communication broadcast into space in 1974. Constructed using binary code to represent scientific and mathematical data, as well as simple graphic pictograms about life on Earth, the message is claimed to be mankind’s first ‘greeting to the universe’.

METI’s final logo design is therefore based on a square grid and uses binary patterns, while the square translation brackets that feature on the extended identity kit hint at scientific annotations; the brackets also enclose the word ‘Hello’ as a further reference to the convention of writing ‘Hello, World!’ when first learning a new programming language.

“The roman alphabet in binary becomes a metaphor for a universal language that appears unfamiliar but can be deciphered,” say the designers.

Additional details include posters designed with perforated squares that can be popped out to create binary messages, as well as postcards that encourage users to create their own forms of communication.

The Partners
www.the-partners.com