O0 extends Fauna Robotics’ brand into a system that moves on screen

Fauna Robotics is a North American humanoid robotics company working towards what it calls “a world where robots operate everywhere people do.” Its first product is Sprout, a humanoid robot the company describes as “the development platform we always wished existed” – one an engineer configures, assembles and adapts around the work in front of them, built with a soft exterior and motor control that yields to external forces. The identity was created by New York-based designer Jack Collins. Fauna then brought in digital product and branding studio O0, whose teams span San Francisco, New York and Europe, to extend it into a design system and website for Sprout’s launch. In O0’s words, the challenge was to make advanced technology feel “approachable, safe, friendly and naturally at home alongside families, kids and pets.” Digital Director Eugene Nechiporchuk describes the job as working out what Collins’ identity had to do once it moved onto screens. “We were figuring out what that identity needed to become once it had to live, move and respond digitally,” he explains. The studio carried the existing forms across the site and wrote new rules for how the identity behaves there, with motion a distinct part of the system rather than a layer added at the end. “Sprout was essentially created by engineers, for engineers,” Web Designer Liza Kovalova tells us. O0 started from the robot itself. Sprout is a platform that can be configured and assembled for different kinds of engineering work, and that led to a visual language of modularity and building – “precise and technical, but with some warmth to it,” Kovalova details. After a demo call with the developers, the studio started asking specific questions about the product, its use cases and capabilities, with the robot still changing while the site was being designed. “We kept coming back to one question: why is the product the way it is, and why does it work the way it does?” Kovalova notes.