Holographik’s identity for Veda treats coins as ancient artefacts

Veda is a DeFi infrastructure protocol, which means its customers are companies rather than the people whose money moves through it. It is something users never see and only feel, despite having taken more than $16 billion in deposits and having over 250,000 customers. Zagreb-based design studio Holographik was brought in to give that invisible infrastructure a face, designing the custom symbol, a system of coins representing Veda’s different vault products, the materials from which those coins are made, and the 3D and motion work that showcases them. The studio’s focus was on creating an identity that feels distinctive, scalable and instantly recognisable across Veda’s growing ecosystem. Crypto has already settled on a well-trodden default look: a coin, usually gold and floating at a three-quarter angle, repeated across site after site. Looking like everyone else, as Holographik saw it, is the quickest way to be forgotten. Veda, however, made that even harder – there’s no product to picture, just the infrastructure other apps are built on. As a result, Holographik needed to make something that felt familiar enough for a company to trust it with real money, yet distinct enough that nobody would confuse it with the dozen coins launched that morning. Too safe and the brand would disappear into the category; too clever and it forfeits the credibility needed for a financial brand to succeed. Before designing anything, Holographik sat with the name. Veda is Sanskrit for knowledge, which points backwards to the way ancient civilisations held on to what they valued. They made objects, such as seals, relics, inscribed tablets and coins, which are built to last and to carry meaning over centuries. An ancient coin was a record as much as it was money, a mark of who stood behind it, trusted because someone had bothered to make it permanent. Stripped of the technology, crypto is a way to store value and trust in a form that outlives the moment. “Originally, we wanted to go with something more tied to the history,” Designer Lazar Glumac tells us, the material choice following from artefacts valued long ago. “It was a bonus that they are still considered valuable metals and that they are considered as stores of value even today.”