Holographik steers Sui’s brand clear of the “DeFi casino” aesthetic

Sui is a Layer 1 blockchain, the base infrastructure that other crypto products are built on top of, designed to let assets, data and permissions be owned, programmed and verified directly. As the platform and its surrounding ecosystem scaled, the Sui Foundation, the independent organisation that stewards it, turned to digital-first design studio Holographik to evolve the main Sui brand, expanding the identity and design system across products, events, websites and motion. The work aimed to refine rather than completely replace, organising everything around this core idea: ‘Sui is the signal, not the noise.’ That principle came out of a frustration with how the category usually communicates. Layer 1 brands have converged on a narrow set of cues – namely dark interfaces, neon gradients, abstract geometry and dense technical language, which is impressive at a glance but keeps audiences at arm’s length. Holographik wanted to steer clear of what it calls the “DeFi casino” aesthetic. “A lot of crypto brands lean into hyper-volatility, which naturally reinforces ideas of speculation,” explains Art Director Philipp Thelen. “For Sui, we wanted to position the brand as a trustworthy long-term infrastructure layer that could speak not only to crypto natives, but also institutions, developers and a much broader audience. The visual language needed to say ‘reliable stack’ and ‘data integrity’ rather than ‘hype.’” The brief began as a refinement and one of the original requirements was to preserve the equity already sitting in the existing logo – a droplet symbol paired with the Sui wordmark. Holographik explored a range of new directions before deciding the strongest move was to keep the symbol and distil it. They adjusted the proportions, reduced some of the elongation and refined the geometry so the droplet feels more balanced and contemporary in digital environments. “The intention was to make the mark feel less decorative and more iconic,” Thelen tells us, so it can sit comfortably inside highly structured interfaces.