Under After’s Nurture identity blends hand-drawn and generative design

Nurture builds the infrastructure for epigenomics – the science of the chemical tags and structural changes across a genome that control gene expression without altering the DNA beneath them. Its tools read the epigenome, software interprets it, and systems remodel it. The customers are biology companies, and within them, the scientists who handle epigenomic data. Tellus is the company’s platform. For the brand strategy and identity, Nurture’s founders turned to New York-based creative studio Under After. “All of our brand work started with a story of what we wanted to build, how we saw the world and the narratives we used to translate the deep technical concepts to a general audience. We didn’t have any pre-existing brand content to build on,” Co-founder & CEO Chuck Frazier tells us. The company works across all of biology, from plants and fungi to human health. “Our brand captures the magic of why the epigenome is a powerful layer of biology: it is the layer where all organisms adapt and encode memory,” Co-founder & CTO Savannah Dearden explains. It’s fair to say that epigenomics is a niche area of molecular biology. Recognition of it is growing fast, but most people have not heard of it. The brand needed to introduce it, and at the same time, position Nurture at the forefront of that recognition. “The question you want is ‘what is Nurture?’” Under After’s Creative Director, Mark Forscher, tells us.