How Recent™ turned a circle, square and triangle into Olla’s identity

Circle, square, triangle. Recent™ used those familiar primitive forms as the backbone of the identity for Olla – a liquid staking protocol built for the Aztec network, a privacy-focused blockchain. In plain terms, Olla lets anyone stake Aztec cryptocurrency, earn rewards and stay liquid, without having to understand the complicated infrastructure underneath. The Abu Dhabi and Amsterdam-based studio’s task was to build an identity that could convey that message to a first-time user. “We asked ourselves: what if we just didn’t do that?” remarks Valentino Angela, Design Director at Recent™, of the custom marks, gradient symbols and abstract iconography that usually aim to signal ‘expertise’ in the DeFi world. “Circles, squares and triangles are the only shapes that are genuinely universal. You know them before you can read. There’s no barrier of interpretation.” The team’s working thesis was that ‘less technical’ is still a reduction. Start from the same reference point and subtract, and you end up inside the category’s gravitational pull. Olla needed to begin somewhere else. The circle represents liquidity, its continuous form carrying an inherent sense of flow. The square is stable, representing the security layer underneath. The triangle, with its directionality and open peak, signals accessibility. It’s an entry point, a way in. “The moment it really clicked was when the shapes stopped feeling like metaphors and started behaving like a system,” Angela explains. “When we could see how each one would move, scale and interact with the others across the identity, that’s when we knew it was working.”