Brass Hands frames Helix-DB’s AI infrastructure as industrial machinery

Helix-DB is a graph-vector database written in the Rust programming language – a fact that shaped far more than the codebase. Kyle Anthony Miller, CEO & Creative Director of New York City-based design studio Brass Hands, took the connection literally – grounding Helix’s colour palette in burnt orange, neutral sand and deep brown, tones that feel like oxidised metal and fabrication surfaces. The palette creates an immediate separation from the blue that dominates infrastructure branding. “It also introduces materiality,” Miller explains. “These colours feel physical. Like oxidised metal or industrial surfaces.” That impulse to make the abstract tangible runs through the full project. Helix operates as infrastructure for AI applications, fueling things behind the scenes rather than being visible from the front. The brief made this distinction explicit and it shaped every visual decision that followed. “We weren’t designing something that sits on top of the stack,” Miller explains. “We were designing something that powers it. That shifts the entire visual language.” Where most technology brands lean soft and interface-driven, Brass Hands treated every surface as though it could be part of a system output – structured, labelled and precise. Miller describes the approach as Neo Industrial, a convergence of legacy industrial systems and modern AI infrastructure, drawn from spec sheets, manufacturing manuals, terminal outputs and early data storage formats. The mark started from the letter ‘H’ used as a container, with horizontal interruptions cutting through the form to represent data passing through. Those breaks create rhythm and direction, subtly suggesting a helix in motion. Miller kept the construction simple enough to hold at any scale, and the mark functions as a compressed version of the broader identity system. Vertical striping across the identity references compression and indexing, while the horizontal interruptions in the mark represent flow. “There’s no need for additional graphic language because the system itself becomes the visual language,” Miller shares.