Logos perform the work in public life that signatures perform in private. They are compact, encrypted, bundled tokens of identity, placed in circulation less for their legibility than for their potential exchange value. When it came to designing the logo for metaLAB, the immediate aim was to capture some of the lab’s core values: modularity, construction, fluidity, the conjugation of things physical with things digital. After a few (unsatisfactory) initial sketches on my part, I handed the task over to my Milanese friend and collaborator Daniele Ledda, who developed the concept of an animated logo that perpetually reshuffles itself. The finalized logo draws on a library of characters (belonging to different typeface families) that have been lifted out of their original context and made to substitute the expected/conventional letter. This assembly of dislocated characters becomes, in effect, metaLAB’s own “proprietary” typeface. The danger that metaLAB might be misread as Metal Lab (not an entirely displeasing scenario) is averted by the separation and different emphasis granted to the morphemes

meta and lab.

A good logo tells a big story in a single word.