In Boundary Analytics’ data-driven identity, Cotton Design ensures that the concept is king

At Boundary Analytics, a tool that helps businesses understand which marketing efforts are leading to actual sales and growth, data leads all conversations. The analytics platform looks at data – and its patterns and timings – to decode which activities are driving results, and in turn, help companies make better decisions about marketing strategies by showing them what works and when it works. To create an identity that would spotlight this laser focus on working with data, the brand reached out to Cotton Design, and on the first day of the project, walked the team through their beta product. “At the time, the product was essentially a very smart algorithm in an Excel spreadsheet, using customer data. The algorithm works with a concept called ‘time lag,’ tracking changes in various marketing metrics over time, such as the number of LinkedIn followers or the change in customer engagement levels,” Founder & Creative Director Talia Cotton explains. These metrics fluctuate, showing patterns of increase and decrease over time – a fact that led Cotton and her team to the central concept. “Each row in the spreadsheet is given a constant height, and the width of each cell within that row varies based on the value it contains. For example, we noticed that a row of cells might have values like 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3… these values aren’t arbitrary or disconnected, they are all related to the number before it and the number after it.” These values, as Cotton describes, determine the varying widths, resulting in a visual pattern that reflects the data’s fluctuations over time. Working with the two-dimensional spreadsheet from Boundary Analytics, Cotton Design created interconnected patterns, that both capture the dynamic nature of the data, and translate the numerical values into a compelling visual motif. This concept was key – it resonated with the brand and led the studio to create a graphics generator that allowed the internal team to create the patterns and also apply them to images with varying levels of abstraction. Leaning into these patterns which underpinned the creative approach, Cotton Design whipped up two versions of the identity – a logo lockup, featuring the pattern icon and the wordmark set in Feature Text; and a variable wordmark in Helvetica Now that cleverly applies the pattern to the stems of certain alphabets, such as the ‘B’ and ‘n.’