What’s in Our Logo
The process of visualizing our vision
A question I get often from our partners and founders is what’s with our Prime Movers Lab logo? Most people have a sense of what it represents but they can’t pin it down precisely. Let’s uncover it together in this blog post.
Logos are everywhere and we’re surrounded by them. Logos nowadays have to be incredibly straightforward to be able to capture the audience immediately, while retaining their unique complexity. The logo is just one small piece of the brand, but it’s the single most common and recognizable device that a company will use. Logos inform the audience what your brand is all about. Most people don’t even consider what logos mean beyond the fact that they represent some of our favorite brands. But when they do question it, the logo must be able to explain the deeply rooted meaning and how it connects to the brand’s vision.
Our logo is built upon the idea of the motor that is powered by ambient static electricity in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. John Galt, the character who invents the motor, believes in the power and glory of the human mind, and the motor symbolizes the machine that runs the world. In the same way, we aim to partner with Prime Movers, the inventors of the world who build breakthrough scientific innovations that power the world, while also being highly relevant to the investors who might be further away from breakthrough science as an industry. Our logo has to be accessible to both audiences and flexible to appear alongside the wide range of companies that we invest in.
We iterated on numerous concepts for the motor icon and settled with the one that can best capture the movement of the spinning motor. The motor concept and the letter P from our name then combine beautifully in that by cutting off half the motor’s base you reveal a silhouetted P. The purple-blue gradient idea naturally emerged when I envisioned how the motor spins perpetually in motion at hyperspeed and creates vibrant plasma-like colors. The asymmetric spokes inside the logo also captures the spinning movement. In the interest of transparency, I admit that the thought bubble idea is a post-rationalization effort when I later realized that the thought bubble shape also resembles the shape of the letter P. When stars and planets are aligned, sometimes happy accidents will happen in our favor.
Ultimately, branding is built on the idea of relationships and is created for people. With each interaction and acknowledgement, an identity starts to form and a personality starts to evolve. It’s the people who create an association with our personality who define our brand, and we’re excited to see how the brand will continue to grow and evolve with us.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and agriculture.
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