Together gives Clusia a four-petal mark showing AI and people at work

Clusia is a US assurance firm for companies that move money, using AI to complete the audits and independent testing that banks and fintechs are required to perform every year. Clusia’s software drafts each audit from the client’s connected systems, showing the source behind every answer, and an accredited professional then reviews and signs it. London-based design and technology agency Together was commissioned to create the identity, spanning the mark, typography, colour, photography, illustration, outdoor advertising, website and product interface. When the design work began, Clusia was two people, and both worked closely with Together throughout. “We wanted something that felt modern and more in line with the best software brands, while still feeling credible to banks and fintechs,” explains Clusia’s Co-founder Reed Switzer. “We also wanted the brand to champion the people behind the work, both at Clusia and at the companies we work with.” Apart from its name, Clusia had no brand to build on. “Clusia is a common privacy hedge, and a lot of the work in compliance and assurance happens behind the scenes – or, in our minds, behind the hedge,” Switzer tells us. “Clusia is a plant, and we liked that,” notes Together’s Creative Director Ben Wynn-Owen, “but we didn’t want to build a brand that was inherently botanical. Leaves and stems would have been the obvious move and completely wrong for a company that audits banks. So the plant is a nod, not the whole idea.” Clusia’s strategy “was about empowering people,” he explains. “Reed put it better than we ever could: AI won’t go to jail if it gets something wrong; people will. So the brand couldn’t look like a machine. It had to look like something that works alongside you.” Together wanted the mark to make the collaboration between AI and people visible, and settled on four petals meeting in the middle. “Enough parts to read as multiple roles working at once, all inside one Clusia system, but simple enough that it still holds together when it’s tiny,” Wynn-Owen details. Because the mark appears on lanyards, phone cases, the browser tab and app icon, Together tested it at every scale, tweaking joints that did not quite meet, overlaps that were slightly off and a centre that closed up too early. “Small stuff, but that’s exactly the stuff that falls apart at 16 pixels, so we didn’t stop until it was right,” he notes. In marketing, the mark turns and opens, and in the product it animates. “It personifies the AI through its interaction states – idle, analysing, scanning, loading – so you can see it’s present while the legwork happens, and then it hands over to the people who sign.” Clusia’s pixel-style illustrations form a flower, a butterfly and abstract fields. “Every pixel in those illustrations is a tiny version of the petal from the logo. Each one stands for a person or an AI doing something in Clusia,” Wynn-Owen tells us. “Lots of small contributions adding up to more than the sum of their parts, which is exactly what an audit is when it’s done properly.” The illustrations gave Together “a way to talk about ideas rather than features,” he adds. “The product UI is good at showing you what Clusia does. It’s less good at saying what it means. So the illustrations take that job. The flower speaks about growth. The butterfly about change, and the abstract forms are for when we want the brand present without saying anything specific at all.” Together started the illustrations as pixel art, drawing on references from old game sprites to cross-stitch, then used generative AI in Figma Weave to test forms quickly before rebuilding them in 3D in Cinema 4D. “That’s where the polish lives. Lighting, depth, the exact spacing between the pixels, the tuning you just can’t get out of a gen AI tool,” Wynn-Owen explains. Built in 3D, the illustrations animate, with particles that grow to form an object, hold, then break apart and reform, so a butterfly becomes a flower and then an abstract field. Klim Type Foundry’s variable sans serif Die Grotesk sets the headlines and the interface, and Studio René Bieder’s Vitruv Text sets the body copy – the reverse of the serif-headline, sans-body pairing that, according to Wynn-Owen, most brands in the category use. One of the outdoor advertising designs pairs ‘Sets up in a day.’ with ‘Evolves for years.’ and another reads ‘Where compliance connects.’ Both ‘Evolves’ and ‘connects’ are set in the italic of Vitruv Text, while the rest of their lines are in Die Grotesk. “A serif word inside a sans headline isn’t decoration; it’s the body face pushing through,” Wynn-Owen notes. “In motion, the sans literally snaps into the serif. One word rather than a whole line is about who’s reading. These are people signing something a regulator might pull apart later, and you can’t shout at them. So we keep the sentence plain and point at the word it hangs on,” he continues, giving ‘Relied on for years’ as an example, with the italic on ‘years.’ “The rule was simple: pick the word that would change if the claim weren’t true, and only one per line.” The palette is deep green, mint and a dark warm brown, and every colour is named after something found in a forest, such as Earth, Bark, Root, Pollen and Blossom. “Every colour had to feel like it grew rather than got generated, because the whole brand is about software that feels human, not robotic,” Wynn-Owen details. In the product, the palette is mostly neutral, with green kept for status, calls to action and the animating logo. “Pure black next to bright green looks like a terminal. Warm brown looks like something living, and it gave the product a dark mode that feels like Clusia rather than every other dark UI,” he adds. “Brown historically hasn’t been a common brand colour, and the way Together used it created a really distinctive world, especially for the space we’re in,” Switzer tells us. Shot in real offices, the photography features people at work, unposed. “The software takes the grind, so the people get to be the experts,” Wynn-Owen explains. “The green cast is the bit that makes it ours. The idea is that you’re looking at the person through a bit of foliage in the foreground, blurred out so it’s just a soft green texture across the front of the frame.” “From the day the site went live, we’ve had investors, founder friends, customers and even random people ask who did the website,” Switzer concludes. Together Clusia